High-quality spatial climate data-sets for Australia

In this paper, we describe a new high-quality set of historical and ongoing realtime 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 modelderived 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 ° × 0.05 °…