The Bureau Unblocked Me! (Small Town Data 2002-2022)

We take a look at real-world temperature trends over the last 20 years in Australia. Perhaps the results will surprise some of you. I somewhat randomly selected 20 locations across Australia. I use the word “somewhat” in that I purposely didn’t use any big-city data. I tried to only use small towns or other isolated locations that hopefully would be unaffected by such phenomena as the “heat island effect”, but I will definitely make a video in the near future that just covers big-city data to see if my concerns are even warranted. I also tried to include inland as well as coastal data.

We take a look at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s Climate Data website, noting that I’ve had nothing but problems with it over the last few weeks. If you watched my previous climate video, you’d know that I was blocked by the Bureau, but luckily, since then, I’ve mysteriously become unblocked. But even the Bureau aren’t hiding the fact that they’ve got issues: “We’re aware that some visitors are experiencing intermittent technical issues with this service.”

Anyway, we’ll be clicking on Text Search. You can try using Map Search, but I found it incredibly frustrating to use. I’ll just be going in alphabetical order here, so we’ll start with the remote Northern Territory town of Alice Springs, specifically, the airport. In the Text Search, we’ll be selecting “Temperature”, “Monthly”, “Mean Maximum Temperature”. Noting that I will only be using the average monthly maximum temperatures throughout this video for each location. I will not be looking at any other data. So you can type in Alice Springs, select it from the list, and then click on the Alice Springs Airport weather station. Once you’ve done that, click on Get Data. You’ll be presented with a table of data, but what I’m interested in is the “All years of data” in order to download the speadsheet data. If you open that up, you’re met with this table. We’re interested in this column, Annual mean temperatures, specifically for the years 2002 to 2022.

Before we get started, I’d just to point out that according to the Bureau, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have pretty much been increasing consistently over the same 20-year period. So, just keep that in mind throughout this presentation.

Okay, so back to our data. If we plot this on a graph, and insert a trend line, we can see that the average maximum temperature has pretty much stayed bang on over the last 20 years, at least in the central Australian town of Alice Springs. Note that at the end of this presentation, I’ll find the average of all our data across Australia and see how that trends.

Next, let’s look at Avalon International Airport outside of Melbourne. We can see that on average, the maximum temperatures have barely changed over the last 20 years, perhaps a very slight increase. Next, let’s look at Batchelor Airport south of Darwin in the Northern Territory. Looking at the graph, I’m noticing a bit of a trend here. Perhaps there’s a slight increase in temperature over the last 20 years. The next location is Burrinjuck Dam in New South Wales. At last, something a little bit different. There’s no doubt that the annual mean maximum temperature is trending downwards. I’m not here to explain it. I’m just here to show you the data.

Our next location is the Cape Moreton Lighthouse off the coast of South East Queensland. I thought it would be a nice breezy location to pick up good temperature data. Again, according to the Bureau’s own data, the mean maximum temperature has been trending downwards over the last 20 years, perhaps not by much, but it’s definitely trending downwards. Our next location is Cloncurry Airport located in rural Queensland. Looking at the temperature data, we can see that it’s slightly decreasing, too. Strange. Next, let’s go to the opal mining town of Coober Pedy in outback South Australia. The Coober Pedy Airport has pretty much averaged 28°C over the last 20 years. Nothing to see here. Flying to the Cressy Research Station south of Launceston in the island state of Tasmania. This would be the first of our locations that has a noticeable increase in temperature over the last 20 years, although it seems to be less than 0.1 of a degree.

So what does all this data from all these location from across Australia tell us? Well, I put all the data from all 20 locations into a single spreadsheet, and then I calculated the average maximum temperature across all locations for every year since 2002, and this is the result. As you can see, the mean maximum temperatures have been trending downwards slightly across Australia, at least, for the 20 random locations that I included, noting again, that I purposely did not include big-city data. I’m not suggesting anything. Make of it what you will.

As I said earlier, I intend on making a video in the near future that just includes big-city data, just to see what’s happening there.

MUSIC
Allégro by Emmit Fenn