High-quality spatial climate data-sets for Australia

In this paper, we describe a new high-quality set of historical and ongoing real-time climate analyses for Australia. These analyses have been developed for improving the definition of past climate variability and change over Australia and to improve on estimates of recent climate. The climate analyses cover the variables of rainfall, temperature (maximum and minimum) as well as vapour pressure at daily and monthly timescales and are complemented by remotely sensed and model-derived data described elsewhere. New robust topography-resolving analysis methods have been developed and applied to in situ observations of rainfall, temperature and vapour pressure to produce analyses at a resolution of 0.05 degrees x 0.05 degrees (approximately 5 km x 5 km). The new methodologies are similar to those applied internationally, but in applying them to Australia we found it necessary and desirable to introduce a number of innovations. The resulting analyses represent substantial improvements on operational analyses currently produced by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, and have a number of advantages over other similar data-sets currently available. Careful attention has been paid to developing systems and data-sets which are robust and useful for the monitoring of both climate variability and climate change. These systems are now running in real time and are expected to form the basis for the ongoing monitoring of Australia's surface climate variability and change by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The underlying data and associated error surfaces (grids and station data) are updated in real time and are all available free of charge through the Bureau's climate website (www.bom.gov.au/climate).