Abstract
Some objective criteria for defining conditions of exceptional drought were evaluated using the GrassGro decision support tool. In two analyses, pasture and animal production were simulated from historical daily weather records for the last 95 years at sites in central New South Wales. The first analysis successfully discriminated between two sites 40 km apart, only one of which had received an effective fall of rain during a long dry spell. In the second analysis, production was simulated at one of these sites to identify the exceptional droughts over the 95-year period from the percentage ranking of moving averages of monthly rainfall, available green herbage and the supplementary feed required for sheep survival. Greater summer rainfall in the second half of the period meant that most of the exceptional droughts were in the first half. We suggest that a monitoring system based on shire-by-shire simulations of appropriate grazing systems, using 18-month moving averages of the weight of supplementary feed required for the survival of the animals, may be a practicable way of establishing exceptional drought circumstances.
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