Offshore Sea Surface Temperatures


At the beginning of the year, Mark Kulmar from Manly Hydraulics Laborotory was kind enough to supply me with a text file containing daily average sea surface temperatures recorded by the Department of Environment, Climate Change and Waters (DECCW). The samples were taken from the Sydney Waverider buoy located off Long Reef. The text file covers the years from 3 March, 1992 to 31 December, 2010 and contains 6,244 records!

I have pondered many ways of representing this data that would be of interest to everyone, then filed it in the too hard basket. Recently, I caught up with an old friend and asked if he would be interested in taking a look at the data. His response was enthusiastic to say the least. Ian is a freshwater ecologist and featured in a story on Catalyst back in 2008 about the heavy metal contamination of the Grose River. Check out the story here.

This is the first of many charts that Ian will be producing starting with the monthly averages for 1994. As you will notice, it is much warmer offshore compared to what the idiots have to endure.


About Dave

Dave has been an idiot for longer than he can remember. However, his Real Idiot status was confirmed about 20 years ago when Linda and Bevan coaxed him out to the post. Developer and administrator of this website as well as reporter, photographer, and chief spell-checker. Thankfully, other idiots contribute to the site to keep it interesting...