Gridded Climate Data for Australia

There are at least three gridded surface climate datasets available for Australia. They each use the same underlying BOM weather station data (albeit with possibly different quality controls applied). They differ in the interpolation method used and the variables provided.

Name	Sources

Name

Sources

BOM Australian Gridded Climate Data (AGCD)

Sometimes also refered to as “BAWAP”

SILO - Queensland Government Data

Longpaddock

ANUCLIM

Users are encourage to explore the details of each to help choose the dataset best suited to their requirements. Here are some articles that compare the datasets:

Beesley, C. A., A. J. Frost and J. Zajaczkowski. (2009). A comparison of the BAWAP and SILO spatially interpolated daily rainfall datasets. MODSIM Congress, Cairns, Australia 13-17 July 2009. https://www.mssanz.org.au/modsim09/I13/beesley.pdf
Tozer, C. R., Kiem, A. S., & Verdon-Kidd, D. C. (2012). On the uncertainties associated with using gridded rainfall data as a proxy 697 for observed. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 16(5), 1481. https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-16-1481-2012
Chubb Thomas H. , Manton Michael J. , Siems Steven T. Peace Andrew D. (2016). Evaluation of the AWAP daily precipitation spatial analysis with an independent gauge network in the Snowy Mountains. Journal of Southern Hemisphere Earth Systems Science 66, 55-67. https://doi.org/10.1071/ES16006
Fu, G., Barron, O., Charles, S.P. et al. (2022). Uncertainty of Gridded Precipitation at Local and Continent Scales: A Direct Comparison of Rainfall from SILO and AWAP in Australia. Asia-Pacific J Atmos Sci. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13143-022-00267-4

Relationship to TERN

The TERN AusCover facility and CSIRO worked closely with BOM to help validate and make available the early versions of the BOM’s AGCD dataset. At the the time the corresponding project in CSIRO was called Australian Water Availability Project (AWAP), and so sometimes the BOMs gridded surface climate data were called “BOM AWAP” or “BAWAP” as well.

TERN no longer maintains a copy nor its own metadata records for BOM AGCD; users are directed to the links above instead.

The following pages are a copy of the records for BOM AGCD once held by TERN AusCover: