Here are 300 of the Australian weather stations that are not compliant with Bureau of Meteorology specifications for siting.
Site compliance is important because temperature data from these stations is liberally reported in the media especially if hot or cold records are set. They also contribute to AWAP (the Australian Water Availability Project) and ADAM which produce maps of present and past temperatures. As well, data from these stations is used to homogenise data at stations in Australia’s ACORN-SAT network, which are used for showing trends since 1910. Finally, this data is exported to be used by international databases (GISS, CruTem4) for regional and global climate analysis. If the data is affected by site specific factors, e.g being too close to a road, this may affect the quality of the analysis.
I am agnostic as to the overall effect of these poorly sited stations. Maxima at some sites may be artificially low, or minima may be artificially high, and this may vary with seasons and rainfall. Analysis and comparison of temperatures will come later. My focus here is to show the large number of modern stations whose data may be unreliable.
The quality of these non-compliant stations varies. While some are truly horrendous, others are not nearly as bad, but all fail on one or more specifications.
This page will be updated as extra stations are identified.
Find your favourite station, click on it, and the link will take you to my assessment of its siting quality. Use the back arrow to return here.
| H | |
| Halls Ck (WA) | Hobart (Tas) |
| Hartz Mountain (Tas) | Hopetoun North (WA) |
| Hervey Bay (Qld) | Horsham (Vic) |
| Hillston (NSW) | Hyden (WA) |
| N | |
| Naracoorte (SA) | Newman Aero (WA) |
| Narembeen (WA) | Norah Head (NSW) |
| Narrogin (WA) | Northam (WA) |
| Nelson Bay (NSW) | Nullarbor (SA) |
| Newcastle (NSW) | Nuriootpa (SA) |
| Newcastle Univ. (NSW) | Nyngan (NSW) |
| R | |
| Rainbow Beach (Qld) | Rockhampton (Qld) |
| Ravensthorpe (WA) | Rolleston (Qld) |
| Redesdale (Vic) | Roseworthy (SA) |
| Richmond (Qld) | Rutherglen (Vic) |
| Robe (SA) | |
| T | |
| Tambo (Qld) | Texas (Qld) |
| Taroom (Qld) | Thredbo Village (NSW) |
| Tatura (Vic) | Tin Can Bay (Qld) |
| Tenterfield (NSW) | Tocumwal (NSW) |
| Territory Grape Farm (NT) | Townsville (Qld) |
| Tewantin RSL Park (Qld) | Tumbarumba (NSW) |
