Griffith Laboratory Weather Data

CSIRO Land and Water Griffith offers free weather information to help the farming, research and broader communities. Current (past 14 days) can be accessed for free, while more extensive information can be prepared for a fee.

• Free weather data for Griffith | Hay | Finley | Tullakool
• Location of the stations
• Historical overview
• Climatic data recorded and instruments used
• How to access weather data
• Specific weather data requests

Free weather data

To obtain the latest information and summaries, just click on the area you are interested in. To read only, use the "dat" files. To export into a spreadsheet, use the "cdt" files. ie if you want the summary for the past seven days weather at Hay, click on Hay7.dat.

• Griffith
• Hay
• Finley
• Tullakool

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Location of stations

CSIRO, Land & Water (Griffith Laboratory) currently runs four automated weather stations located at:

Griffith Station – 34° 17' South 146° 3’ East. Farm 459, Research Station Road, Griffith NSW.

Hay Station – 34° 35’ South 144° 52’ East. University of NSW Experimental Site, Hay, NSW.

Finley Station – 35° 40’ South 145° 33’ East. Finley Airport, Finley, NSW.

Tullakool Station – 35° 20’ South 145° 3’ East. Jointly operated by CSIRO and Murray Irrigation Ltd, Deniliquin.

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Historical overview

Collection of weather data in Griffith commenced in 1931 using manual observations. 

By 1970, manual data was being stored on punched cards. 

In October 1981, continuous automatic collection of weather data from hourly readings commenced. Initially, these were stored temporarily on cassette tape and the tape read every few days. 

In 1984, the automatic weather station on the meteorological lawn was connected by land line to a time-sharing PDP11 computer to log the data every five minutes, from which hourly data were derived.

In 1999 the weather system was updated to a NT system and stored in a central database.

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Climatic data recorded and instruments used

The following parameters are logged: wind-run, rainfall, solar irradiance, dry-bulb temperature, wet-bulb temperature (or relative humidity). 

• Windrun is measured with a three-cup anemometer. 
• Rainfall is measured with a tipping bucket raingauge with each tip being one point (0.01in) or 0.25mm. 
• Solar irradiance is measured with a silicon solar cell. Dry-bulb temperature is measured with a linearised thermistor or semi-conductor temperature sensor. 
• Wet-bulb depression is measured with two copper-constantan thermocouples in series with one junction at air temperature and the other junction kept moist with a standard muslin wick.

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How to access weather data

Full Weather Data is made available to CSIRO staff, NSW Agriculture and the Bureau of Meteorology.

The latest 14 days of weather data is available free to the general public via this web site.

Historical Data can be purchased from CSIRO, Land and Water (Griffith Laboratory) by contacting the Laboratory on 

Ph: 02 69601500, or E-mail: weather-gr@csiro.au

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Specific weather data requests (prices include GST)

It is possible to obtain specific weather information, with the cost determined by the time taken to prepare the data.

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