LICENCE: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
This work is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0. This allows others to copy, distribute and create derivative works provided that they credit the original source.
This repo is deprecated. Please see https://github.com/ivanhanigan/HutchinsonDroughtIndex for ongoing work such as this exploratory data analysis
This is monthly drought data for Australia 1890-2008 using the Hutchinson Drought Index applied to Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) gridded weather data. The source weather dataset is monthly interpolations of rainfall data 1890-2008 from BoM weather stations, gridded at 0.25 degree of latitude-longitude across Australia.
The algorithm used to calculate the drought index using the Hutchinson method is stored in this repository.
The source weather data can be accessed from the principal investigators: Peter Powers and Dean Collins, National Climate Centre, BoM.
The source weather data are not easily accessible. It would be good to deposit these into a repository such as the Australian Data Archives. Doing this will need agreement from the original authors at the BoM.
The National Climate Centre. Australian gridded rainfall (1890-2008) and temperature (1950-2008) data at 0.25 degree of latitude-longitude: The Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre, 700 Collins Street, Docklands, Melbourne, VIC, 3008. 2004.
Smith DI, Hutchinson MF, McArthur RJ. Climatic and Agricultural Drought: Payments and Policy 1992. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. http://fennerschool-research.anu.edu.au/spatio-temporal/publications/cres_paper1992.pdf
Koch, SE, M DesJardins, and PJ Kocin. An interactive Barnes objective map analysis scheme for use with satellite and conventional data. Journal of Climate and Applied Meteorology 22, no. 9 (1983): 1487-1503. http://www.dca.ufcg.edu.br/grads/gs/Barnes/Barnes_02.pdf.
Jones, DA, and G Weymouth. An Australian monthly rainfall dataset, 1997. Bureau of Meteorology, Technical Report 70.