Monthly total precipitation of each month, for the Australian continent between 1970-2016. Monthly rainfall totals are useful for estimation of soil moisture for plant growth and surface runoff via soil water balance modelling. Modelled by expressing each monthly value as a normalised anomaly with respect to the gridded 1976-2005 mean for each month as provided by ANUClimate_v1-0_rainfall_monthly-mean_0-01deg_1976-2005. The monthly anomalies were interpolated by trivariate thin plate smoothing spline functions of longitude, latitude and vertically exaggerated elevation using ANUSPLIN Version 4.5. Station elevations were 0.05 degree local averages of grid values from the GEODATA 9 second DEM version 3 as provided by ANUClimate_v1-0_digital-elevation-model-05deg-average_terrain_0-01deg. Monthly data values were calculated from Bureau of Meteorology daily data at stations where there were no missing observations and any accumulated records were wholly within the month, giving an average of 6410 data points per month between 1970 and 2016. Automated quality assessment rejected on average 16 data values per month (0.2%) with extreme studentised residuals. The mean absolute value of all individual cross validation residuals provided by the spline analysis is 10.9 mm (18% of the overall mean). A comprehensive assessment of the analysis and the factors contributing to the quality of the final interpolated monthly rainfall grids is in preparation.
