Hydrology of the Northern Flinders Ranges South Australia
Vulkathnha-Gammon Ranges Scientific Project (VGRaSP)
This page is a work in progress
This page and its links have been compiled from various sources, to provide current and historical
rainfall and streamflow information about the area east of Leigh Creek and into the Gammon
Ranges, Arcoona Catchment Area. If you didn't arrive at this page via the Scientific Expeditions
Group (SEG) website, click here it is for a bit of background.
We provide the following links and documents. Between them, you can find all rainfall and
streamflow data from the inception of VGRaSP (1988) until the latest (today's) Australian Bureau of
Meteorology (BOM) pages.
VGRaSP_rain_historic_corrected.xls 1MB
This is corrected & validated historical rainfall data from all nine pluvios from Sept 1988 to April
2012. The data gets updated every year or two. Due to verification and correction, it is more
accurate than BOM data. Refer to FAQs for further information.
VGRaSP_rain_historic_corrected.txt 1MB
Same data as above but in a different format.
BOM_rain_pretty.xls
This fills the gap after VGRaSP_rain_historic_corrected.xls up to about a month ago.
It provides BOM data no longer available from BOM's website.
Where VGRaSP_rain_historic_corrected.xls and BOM_rain_pretty.xls overlap,
VGRaSP_rain_historic_corrected.xls is to be preferred.
This gets updatedevery month or two.
BOM_rain_ugly.csv
This is a csv file of data that is compiled from BOM data. It fills the gap between
BOM_rain_pretty.xls and about one day ago. It provides BOM data no longer available from BOM's
website.
It usually updated several times a day, but the data can be one day behind.
For the most recent day, ie rainfall to 0900, see BOM's pages.
Seven Day Rainfall Bulletin for Mid-North and Gammon Ranges Catchments
Daily Rainfall Bulletin(see Far North)
Map showing location of hydrology monitoring sites - Graham to do
****get proper map from Graham****
South Australia Rainfall and River Conditions
Whole of South Australia
South Australia (Northeast) Rainfall and River Conditions
Hover over dots in the area of interest between Leigh Creek and Arkaroola.
Historic data
Graham to do
The data uploaded on site from all the SEG rain gauges (telemetered or not) and the river flow site
is checked and adjusted to correct time drift, remove calibration and remove known errors etc. The
end result are datasets that are the best available, making them a useful historic representation of
the hydrology for the area. It should be this data that should be available to anyone doing a
hydrological study of the area. All the SEG hydrology data is currently published on the South
Australian Water Connect web-site, and is now available as the validated historic data from this
SEG web site.
The "direct" SA Government Water Connect links are:
Rain Gauges
North
Moolooloo
Pfitzners
Maynards
Well
Mocatoona
Arcoona Bluff
Exclusion
Enclosure
South
Branch
Sambot
Plateau
and
Flow Gauge
Arcoona
Creek
Frequently asked questions
What's special about VGRaSP_rain_historic_corrected.xls? What's wrong with BOM's data?
This is all the rainfall data straight from the data loggers themselves, from inception of each
pluviometer until the last date for the record. It shows daily rainfall totalled at 9AM. In the
spreadsheet, cells with blank indicate either missing data or data not recorded (i.e. before start of
record). The data is probably more accurate than what's on the Bureau of Met web site because
they miss days when telemetry didn't work, have some days where calibration data is wrongly
included in the record, and don't account for clock error so rainfall around 9AM is attributed to the
wrong day.
A major issue with BOM's historical data is that BOM stopped adding to historical data about
August 2011. So nothing after that.
Why does VGRaSP_rain_historic_corrected.xls start and finish on different days?
Start dates vary because various pluvios were commissioned or inherited from BOM at different
times. Finish dates vary because it takes 3 or 4 days bushwalking in rough country to pick up data
loggers. Occasionally roads are closed by floods so there might be the last few months missing
from some sites.
Why is BOM_rain_ugly.csv so ugly?
Ugly consists of raindata scraped from the BOM website. Daily Rainfall Bulletin
It gets updated a few times a day, to deal with the vagiaries of :-When BOM puts out the "Rainfall to 0900" - any time from just after 0900 to late afternoon.
-When my computer gets turned on.
-How Bigpond wireless internet happens to be working at the time, generally OK but subject to
timeouts & failures.
So there are sometimes multiple entries for the same day, and sometimes even late in the day you
won't find today's data.
It's a .csv file. If your spreadsheet program doesn't recognise it immediately, you might need to
specify comma separated, rather than tab, space, hyphen, colon etc separated.
Why is BOM_rain_pretty.xls so pretty
Pretty is an .xls file that is essentiallyBOM_rain_ugly.csv tidied up. I do this every month or so.
Why does VGRaSP_rain_historic_corrected.xls show nine pluvios, but most other documents only
show 4 or 5.
SEG VGRaSP has 8 pluvios, commissioned by SEG or inherited from BOM as BOM has cut
services. They are known as Arcoona Bluff, Exclosure, Maynard’s Well, North Moolooloo, Pfitzner’s
Well, Sambot, South Branch, The Plateau. All of these have their data loggers swapped and their
data extracted every 6 months, all going well. (Remote area road and travel can thwart the best
laid plans) This data has been cleaned up and used in VGRaSP_rain_historic_corrected.xls. Five
of these sites are also telemetered. That means BOM rings them up to find daily data, which
appearson Daily Rainfall Bulletin, from which we scrape data for BOM_rain_ugly.csv, as a public
service. The Plateau was the first pluvio, commissioned in 1988, but has only been telemetered
since November 2011 when the introduction of NextG made this feasable. Mocatoona is another
site that we have looked at as BOM abandon it, but sadly it’s looking like we don’t have the
resources to take it on.
Why does [some file] not open in [some software]?
If you find some incompatibility, please tell me here. I'm interested, and might be able to help.
BOM_rain_ugly.csv is a .csv (Comma Separated Values) file. If your spreadsheet program doesn't
recognise it immediately, or the columns are messy and illogical, you might need to specify comma
separated, rather than tab, space, hyphen, colon etc separated. It should be laid out like this:13
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
Jan
Jan
Jan
Jan
Jan
Jan
Jan
Jan
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
Arcoona Bluff
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
Maynards Well
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
North Moolooloo
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
Pfitzners Well
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
The Plateau
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
year
month
day
Compatibility fixes.
10/07/2012 Microsoft Excel 2003 won't open a .csv with more than 256 columns. So I keep
VGRaSP_rain_ugly.csv shorter than that.
Webpage author's technical note.
This webpage and some linked material were developed using open source software. Open source
software is generally more standards compliant than commercial software, often works better, and
costs nothing. Of course it also deals well with the formats used by commercial vendors. I've used
LibreOfficeWriter, LibreOfficeCalc, Firefox, and Komposer, on Ubuntu Linux. All these also work
with Microsoft Windows. I've written the web-scraper in Python, again open source, cross platform,
and a good beginner's language. I've tested on Ubuntu 12.04 with software mentioned above, and
several versions of Microsoft Windows, Office and Internet Explorer. I've not tested on a Mac.
Comments or questions to Garry