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Climate Analysis
BRS has developed a number of tools to help decision makers interpret climate variability by converting it to agriculturally meaningful measures of reliability and risk.
These tools have been used widely in the past to adapt a range of statistics describing climate into useful measures for farmers. For instance, they can predict the likelihood of rain between seasons or within a season.
BRS is now extending these tools to show farmers and producers the effects of climate change on seasonal variability and reliability. In this way climate change becomes clearly linked to the reliability measures producers understand and use on an operational basis.
Rainfall reliability wizard
This tool rapidly evaluates rainfall events and shows rainfall in terms of reliability across broad geographic areas.
Rainfall, or lack of it, is a major production risk for agriculture.The rainfall reliability wizard enables users to explore rainfall risk based on their own experience and expectations. The wizard uses localised monthly rainfall data, broken down into 25 kilometre square areas Australia-wide and sourced from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. With this tool producers can make decisions using their own historical knowledge enhanced by the calculated information.
National Agricultural Monitoring System
The NAMS website contains maps, graphs and reports that demonstrate the production conditions for major agricultural systems, as well as the state of their climatic influences.
The main purpose of the NAMS is to streamline the Exceptional Circumstances (drought) application and assessment processes. NAMS will also assist farmers prepare for and manage risks to production systems posed by climate variability.
The NAMS contains current and historical data on measured and modelled production, financial impacts, remote sensing and climate. This information is presented both graphically and via reports, providing general background information and current climatic, production and resource conditions.
Meat and Livestock Australia research and development project
A new website available to all MLA members will allow livestock producers across southern Australia to improve their grazing management by better predicting rainfall and pasture growth using prevailing seasonal conditions and historical trends. The website has been developed by the BRS for MLA, in conjunction with sheep and cattle producers throughout southern Australia, as part of MLA’s More Beef from Pastures program. Called the MLA Rainfall to Pasture Growth Outlook Tool, the website allows producers to access rainfall records, soil moisture records and the resulting pasture growth patterns for over 3300 locations across southern Australia, and compares this historical data to present conditions.
Producers can then predict what future rainfall and subsequent pasture growth might look like based on what happened during past years with similar conditions to date.
Intergrated Toolset
With the Integrated Toolset, BRS can create interpolated surfaces, with full error diagnostics, from multiple point data. Other features of the Integrated Toolset can enhance the analysis and manipulation of various raster and vector datasets. BRS has also recently purchased the SILO database to provide access to high quality, real time climate data. Using the Integrated Toolset with the SILO database, BRS has the capacity to focus on specific regions and provide detailed spatial analysis.