Twenty years of daily weather from eight Australian capital cities, told through ten charts.
Most of us experience Australia's climate through a daily weather forecast: today is going to be hot, or it might rain tomorrow. What gets lost in that day-to-day view is how the country actually behaves over time, and how dramatically different the climate is depending on where you live.
This page is for anyone curious about that bigger picture. Each chart is built on real, day-by-day observations from the same eight capital cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Hobart, Darwin and Canberra), covering the period from 2005 through to early 2025. That gives just over 7,400 daily readings of temperature, rainfall, sunshine, wind and humidity per city.
The story it tells is messier than a textbook trend line. Some cities are warming, some are not. Drought years and La Niña years can flip a five-year average. Rainfall in the tropical north has almost nothing in common with rainfall in the dry south. And inside one city, Melbourne, every kind of weather Australia has to offer can show up in a single year.
All eight Australian capitals were warmer in 2024 than in their 20-year average. Perth went up almost a full degree. The chart below shows how.
Pulling 20 years of daily observations into one page tells a story that is harder to read than people often expect. Yes, every capital ran warmer than its 20-year average in 2024 (Chart 1). Yes, single-day extremes in Melbourne are climbing (Chart 8). But the five-year slope chart (Chart 2) shows several cities going the other way, because the climate signal is small compared with the noise from La Niña, El Niño and drought cycles.
The other side of the story is geography. Australia is so wide that "the Australian climate" is essentially meaningless: Darwin gets more than three times the rain of Adelaide (Chart 5), and a winter day in Hobart looks nothing like a winter day in Brisbane (Chart 4). The southern half of the country gets most of its rain in winter and the northern half gets all of its rain in summer (Chart 6).
What you see here is also why a real understanding of climate needs decades, not headlines. If you only watched one summer, you would conclude almost anything. Twenty years is barely long enough to see the trend through the variability. The data will keep arriving, day by day. The point of a page like this is to give the next 20 years a baseline to argue against.