Downloading Data

Disclaimer

The material provided through this website is experimental and derived through active research. The Australian National University does not have a legislated role in providing authoritative information. All information is made available on the understanding that it does not constitute professional advice. Before relying on the material in any important matter, users should carefully evaluate its accuracy, currency, completeness and relevance for their purposes, and should obtain any appropriate professional advice relevant to their particular circumstances. Links to other websites do not constitute an endorsement of material at those sites, or any associated organisation, product or service.

 

Data Origin

Most of the data are produced by our OzWALD (Australian Water and Landscape Dynamics) model-data fusion system, which integrates a wide range of satellite and ground observations through the use of a computer model of Australia’s environment. You can find further details about the source and processing of the data in ANU’s OzWALD system in the following short paper (Note: because of ongoing development, aspects of the system may have changed since this paper was published):

Van Dijk, A.I.J.M. and Rahman, J. (2019). Synthesising multiple observations into annual environmental condition reports: the OzWALD system and Australia’s Environment Explorer. In Elsawah, S. (ed.) MODSIM2019, 23rd International Congress on Modelling and Simulation. Modelling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand, December 2019, pp. 884–890.
ISBN: 978-0-9758400-9-2. https://doi.org/10.36334/modsim.2019.J5.vandijk 

The spatial data produced by ANU are derived from original observations and derived data products published by the following organisations:
  • Geoscience Australia’s Digital Earth Australia:
    • Landsat-derived reflectance geomedians (link)
    • Landsat-derived Water Observations from Space (link)
    • Hotspots fire occurrence and intensity (link)
  • Bureau of Meteorology: gridded climate data (AGDC, link)
  • European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts:
    • reanalysis weather variables (ERA5, link)
    • fire carbon emissions (GFAS, link)
  • NASA:
    • GPM satellite rainfall estimates
    • various MODIS satellite products, including leaf area index (link) and burned area (link)
  • CSIRO: MODIS-derived fractional cover of bare soil, litter and canopy (link)
  • ANU: MODIS-derived fuel moisture content (link)
  • ABARES: land use mapping (link)
If you have any questions about the methods and the data on our website, please do not hesitate to ask us about it.

 

Downloading data

Regional Summary Data
You can download Regional Summary Data directly via the ‘Get the data‘ link below the data chart on the website. If you wish to download all available data at once, you can find all data in csv format here.
Gridded data
All gridded data can be accessed and downloaded via NCI’s THREDDS service in NetCDF4 format. If you are familiar with these then you can directly access our data catalogue. You can find annual files with data at the highest temporal and spatial time step available. To access the gridded annual maps you can also follow the Direct Download Links below. If you are not familiar with the NCI THREDDS you can find a good description here. Various software packages have native or external utilities to read NetCDF format, including QGIS, ArcGIS (instructions here), Matlab, Python, and ENVI/IDL. You can find a partial (if somewhat dated) list of processing and viewing software here.

Note: each file contains multiple layers; one for each year in the record. These can be accessed by year by using OpenDAP protocols (see above). Files containing all years can also be downloaded directly in full, but note that files are usually larger than 500 MB.