Australian Rainfall Trend Explorer

The Australian Rainfall Trend Explorer is an interactive web application and a simple tool to query rainfall data for selected weather stations and selected agricultural production areas in Australia. The tool assists identification of statistically significant long-term trends in annual, seasonal and extreme rainfall between 1907 and 2018. The selected agricultural production areas are the Western Australia Wheat Belt, the Northern Murray Darling Basin and the coastal areas of southern Queensland and northern New South Wales. They span across important cropping, horticulture, and livestock production zones and different climate zones. Gross value of production in these three areas together accounts for approximately 30% of the national total. The selected weather stations represent different rainfall zones in each study area. The objective of the Australian Rainfall Trend Explorer is to compare year-to-year variability in precipitation with any potential long-term trend and to understand if recent experience of a drying trend in parts of Australia are part of a longer-term trend.