Abstract
A serious gap in the official rainfall records for Australia for the period 1939–45 would not have come as a surprise, but with the receipt recently of the 1945 issue of the official “Rain Map of Australia”, it is clear that there is no such gap, but only some delay in printing. The disturbance of national life caused by the War was not allowed to affect the continuity of the 1,300 selected observing stations which are used when the official monthly and annual maps are prepared, maps which are said in the opening paragraph of the notes that accompany them to give a very fair representation of the rainfall distribution over Australia. That a number of the less-important private observing stations had to be discontinued seems only too probable, especially in northern regions from which the population was evacuated and to which the strategy of ‘scorched earth’ was applied. Very brief study of the notes that accompany the rainfall maps for this last year of the War is sufficient to reveal the unstable character of the Australian climate.
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Rainfall Records of Australia. Nature 160, 393 (1947). https://doi.org/10.1038/160393b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/160393b0