Picture: Perth, WA. Credit: Nathan Hurst (Unsplash).

Southwestern Australia is a high-priority area for climate research as there has been a significant, anthropogenically influenced winter rainfall decline detected in the region since 1970. CLEX researchers have constructed the oldest daily historical climate dataset for Perth, southwestern Australia, to provide an extended record for analysing pre‐industrial climate variability and extremes for the region.

This newly digitised record contains sub‐daily observations of temperature, barometric pressure, wind direction, and weather remarks, including rain days, from 1830 to 1875. This new record from Perth provides 19th-century data from a data-sparse region of the Southern Hemisphere that can now be compared with daily observations from South Africa, New Zealand, and southeastern Australia, improving hemispheric estimates of pre-industrial climate variability.

Paper: Gergis, J, Baillie, Z, Ingallina, S, Ashcroft, L, Ellwood, T. A historical climate dataset for southwestern Australia, 1830–1875. Int J Climatol. 2021; 1– 22. https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.7105