20th century changes in temperature and rainfall in New South Wales

Mean minimum temperatures increased across virtually all of Australia during the 20th century (Torok and Nicholls 1996). Mean maximum temperatures also increased over most of the country, but decreased in central and eastern New South Wales, and isolated parts of southern Queensland (Fig. 1). A high-quality temperature dataset (Della-Marta et al. 2004), based on a dataset originally developed by Torok and Nicholls (1996), is used here, along with historical rainfall datasets, to investigate the nature of this cooling. Australian rainfall increased rapidly and substantially in the middle of the 20th century (Coughlan Aust. Met. Mag. 53 (2004) 263-268