Week 9: Nothin' lasts forever, even cold cold Sydney Rain

A chart and some thoughts. That is all.

Hello chart-lovers.

I took a few weeks off as I was busy watching lots of movies at the Sydney Film Festival. It was fantastic - will do again next year.

There has been what feels like a lot of rain recently. But is it a lot more than usual for the Sydney area? I decided to look up the data available from the Bureau of Meteorology and have a dig around. I know that there are periods that have broken records in areas across the state this year (well, according to Tom Saunders - my weather guy on ABC NSW), but what about Sydney. The data I extracted gives me total rainfall for a month, collected at the Botanic Gardens from January 1885 up until May 2024.

June is one of the wettest months of the year (second only to March), with the normal trend seeing the weather dry up a bit next month and more into September and October. Along with the peaks of rain I also looked at the lows. The driest December on record was in 2019 (1.9mm), and if you were in Sydney during that time you’ll remember the heat, and how we were covered in smoke for most of it due to devastating bush fires all over the state. In January 1888 not a drop of rain was recorded in Sydney. That year Sydney only received 552mm of rain in total. To put the measure in context we received 327mm in April alone this year (the 10th highest April rainfall on record).

Download the PDF attached t have a closer look at the data.

You can have a look at the data recorded for your own area here. The type of plot I used is called a violin plot and you can read about what it is here (basically a fancy density plot that reflects the distribution so you get a shape to help you see where the data clumps or stretches to). I used it as they sort of look like rain drops. I made the chart in ggplot and exported to Illustrator.

I also have forgot to mention that if you are an R user and are curious what I’ve done script-wise you can have a squizz on gitHub. I don’t normally upload the data I use there, but it maybe useful in some sort of way.

Hope you have a nice week ahead of you.

This newsletter was created on Gadigal Land. Just up the river from where I live, pictures and marks were made on rocks to share stories about the world with others, and they were put there tens of thousands of years ago. I want to acknowledge that this tradition of story telling and using images to communicate and pass on information is nothing new - and the Custodians of this unceded land were here, and doing it first.