Credit
We at TERN acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians throughout Australia, New Zealand and all nations. We honour their profound connections to land, water, biodiversity and culture and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
Purpose
The paper entitled "Heatwaves intensification in Australia: A consistent trajectory across past, present and future" has been published in Science of the Total Environment describing the historical and projected changes in heatwaves characteristics. The "Historical Heatwaves in Australia" dataset accounts for the historical component and is released to provide access to researchers and stakeholders to information on the key heatwave characteristics during the 1950 to 2016 period. The dataset was derived following methodology adopted by the Bureau of Meteorology to assess and monitor heatwaves based on the Excess Heat Factor.
Lineage
Data Creation
Excess Heat Factor:
We used observed daily surface temperature (minima and maxima) with 5 km spatial resolution for historical records (period 1950–2016) for the entire Australia obtained from the Australian Water Availability Project – AWAP. We explore the Excess Heat Factor (EHF) to measure and monitor heatwaves. In order to represent and quantify heatwave changes we explore a range of different characteristics of heatwaves such as peak temperature, number of events, frequency and duration following the approach adopted in previous heatwave studies. The heatwave characteristics are represented by four indices based on the EHF named: Heatwave peak temperature, Heatwave Number, Heatwave Frequency and Heatwave Duration. Other methodological details are described in the paper by Trancoso et al (2020): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720340432.
Authors
Point of Contact
Publisher
Data Quality