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Australian Multi-century cool- and warm season rainfall reconstructions (2017)

Current version: V3.0

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Citation details Freund, M., Henley, B. J., Karoly, D. J., Allen, K. J., and Baker, P. J.: Multi-century cool- and warm-season rainfall reconstructions for Australia’s major climatic regions, Clim. Past, 13, 1751–1770, https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-13-1751-2017, 2017

Summary of reconstruction:

This study reconstructed Australian cool (April-September) and warm (October-March) season rainfall over 1200-1600CE, using an extensive network of palaeoclimate proxies from the Southern Hemisphere. The proxy network was made up of 185 records, sourced from a variety of proxy archives. All records relate to Australian climate directly or as a teleconnection, with the majority of records taken from the Australasia and New Zealand Summer Drought Atlas (ANZDA) (Palmer et al., 2015), or from PAGES Ocean2k data products (Neukom and Gergis, 2012; Tierney et al., 2015). The range of records used are described in Table. A below. To be included in the proxy network, records had to extend back to at least 1880CE, have a minimum annual resolution, and have met the requirements for the ANZDA and Ocean 2K data products respectively.

Proxy archive No. of Records Region Resolution (No. Records)
Tree-Rings Records 131 Australasian-Pacific region Annual (131)
Coral Records 36 Tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans Annual (11), Sub-annual (25)
Speleothem Records 5 Australasian-Pacific Annual (5)
Ice Cores Records 13 Antarctic region Annual (13)


The proxy network was used to reconstruct cool and warm seasons of rainfall in eight geographically distinct areas of Australia. The eight Natural resource management (NBRM) regions can be seen in the figure below, and were identified as; the Monsoonal North, the Wet Tropics, The East Coast, The Central Slopes, the Murray Basin, the southern and south-western flatlands, the southern Slopes, and the Rangelands. A nested, composite-plus-scale (CPS) approach is used to reconstruct the rainfall average for each region.

rainfall-australasia

Figure A: Spatial and temporal distribution of proxies used in the reconstruction, taken from Freund et al., 2017. Each of the natural resource management regions are shown, as well as a comparison of the temporal resolution of the proxies.

How to access reconstruction data:

The results of the reconstructions are archived in Melbourne university’s Figshare repository, and can be accessed via the button below, or at the top of the page. The study page includes citation information, descriptions of the files and NBRM regions, and past versions of the dataset. The table below describes the data files available for download. Files are formatted in both netcdf and text format,and the text versions can be previewed by clicking on the chosen dataset. You can access to the figshare site via the button below, or at the top of the page. The full list of proxies used is available in the supplementary section of Freund et al., 2017, as a pdf table.

> Access data (Figshare)

File Description
Warm_Season_reconstruction_NRM
rainfall_Freundetal2017
AWAP NRM seasonal rainfall reconstructions for the warm season, including a read me paragraph. available as text of netcdf
Cool_Season_reconstruction_NRM
_rainfall_Freundetal2017
AWAP NRM seasonal rainfall reconstructions for the cool season, including a read me paragraph. available as text of netcdf
Cool_Season_instrumental_NRM_rainfall
_Freundetal2017
AWAP NRM seasonal rainfall averages for the cool season, including a read me paragraph. available as text of netcdf
Warm_Season_instrumental_NRM_rainfall_Freundetal2017 AWAP NRM seasonal rainfall averages for the warm season, including a read me paragraph. available as text of netcdf

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