9s Precipitation seasonality: climatology for continental Australia 1976-2005 and 2050 projections:

Brief description

9s resolution climate surfaces for the Australian continent, describing the seasonaility of precipitation as defined in Williams et al 2010(SRAIN1, SRAIN2 as supplied). This collection represents 30 year average data.

The two metrics calculated for each scenario are:
PTS1: Summer-winter precipitation seasonality: where summer-dominated rainfall is the ratio + summer/winter, and
winter-dominated is the ratio -(minus sign) winter/summer; where
summer precipitation is defined as the sum of Dec-Jan-Feb
precipitation and winter precipitation is defined as the sum of
Jun-Jul-Aug precipitation
PTS2: Spring-Autumn precipitation seasonality where
spring-dominated rainfall is the ratio + spring/autumn, and
autumn-dominated rainfall is the ratio -(minus sign)
autumn/spring; where spring is defined as Sep-Oct-Nov and
autumn is defined as March-April-May

Data are provided as zipped ESRI float grids: Binary float grids (*.flt) with associated ESRI header files (*.hdr) and projection files (*.prj). After extracting from the zip archive, these files can be imported into most GIS software packages, and can be used as other binary file formats by substituting the appropriate header file.

Additionally a short methods summary is provided in the file 9sClimateMethodsSummary.pdf for further information, including a nomenclature for files.



Lineage: Climate surfaces for the present were based on the ANUCLIM 6.1 (Xu and Hutchinson, 2011) 30 year average climate surfaces for Australia (1976-2005), with elevational lapse rate correction applied over the 9s GEODATA digital elevation model (Hutchinson et al , 2008). Summary statistics for each variable were then calculated including variables described in Williams et al (2010). A short methods summary is provided in the file 9sClimateMethodsSummary.pdf for further information.