190 A. DUCKWORTH. 



A COMPARISON OF the RAINFALL of SYDNEY 



and MELBOURNE, 1876-1905. 



By A. Duckworth, f.r.e.s. 



[With Plates XVII. - XVIII. j 



[Read before the Royal Society of N. S. Wales, December 4, 1907.'] 



As regards the weather and rainfall of Australia is there 

 not rather too great a tendency to theorise and to draw 

 conclusions based upon the experiences of one's own State 

 rather than to extend the field of observations to the whole 

 of Australia? With this in mind I have in the following 

 paper endeavoured to shew both in tabular form and by 

 diagrams a comparison for the past thirty years of the 

 rainfall of Melbourne and of Sydney, based upon the records 

 of the Observatories of these cities. I select these cities 

 as the greatest population centres of Australia ; the popu- 

 lation of Melbourne and suburbs being 526,000, and that of 

 Sydney 539,000, thus accounting for 1,065,000 out of a total 

 of 4,123,000 inhabitants of the Commonwealth. New 

 Zealand, however, which is a separate Dominion, also affords 

 a singularly interesting field of observation, inasmuch as 

 its records are officially stated to contain almost no 

 evidence of any lasting drought. But the rainfall statistics 

 both of New South Wales and Victoria furnish evidence of 

 very great divergency in the annual amount of their rain- 

 fall distribution. It is necessary to point out that the 

 figures relating to both Melbourne and Sydney are applicable 

 only to the immediate vicinity of those cities. To show 

 this it may be mentioned that whilst the average rainfall 

 of Melbourne is given as 21*92 inches, that of the adjacent 

 district, comprising the Yarra River and the Dandenong 

 Creek, shows an average of 35*91 inches during the past ten 

 years (1896 - 1905), and that whilst Sydney has an average 



