Article
The agreement between the 12-month running means of rainfall
and sea temperature looked, to my eye, to be pretty good—and
provocative, although I am still puzzled by the units.
Recently this led me to do much more work than I would have
liked. I accessed the relevant datasets and set about calculating
12-month running means with scripts that I wrote. The rainfall
calculation was not difficult; the sea temperature data (I took
0m values) were, for me, challenging, but in the end I came up
with the top and bottom panels in Figure 1.
BAMOS
Sep 2018
The rainfall plots, old and new, can be put one on top of the
other. The temperature plots differ and I have no explanation
for that. I did a few checks straight from the Excel data sheets
and the agreement with what I’d got from my script was good.
I then extended the plots from around 1943 to 2010 (Figure 2).
I certainly can’t see a good link between rainfall and sea surface
temperature, but I feel as if I’ve given that old plot and the
person who made it a fair go.
Figure 2. Twelve month running means of Sydney rainfall and Port Hacking sea-surface temperature for almost 70 years.
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