Rainfall Mapper Case Study #1 - VIC

Victorian Wimmera / Southern Mallee: capturing localised, intense, summer thunderstorms

Increasingly, a large proportion of rainfall in south-east Australia is linked to thunderstorms.  Weather systems, such as troughs, frequently generate erratic, short-lived and isolated bursts of precipitation resulting in intense localised rainfall.

These events are often poorly represented in the official rainfall records from the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM), due to the placement of the BoM’s rain gauges that limit the capture of data for localised rainfall events.  Using two rainfall examples, this case study demonstrates the value of Rainfall Mapper with the finer resolution to more reliably map rainfall at the farm scale.

Example #1: Rainfall event at Rainbow, Victoria - January 2022 (Click the link to read the full case study example)

Example #2: Rainfall event at Cowangie Victoria - February 2026 (Click the link to read the full case study example)

Conclusions: Both these examples demonstrate the ability of Rainfall Mapper to provide more accurate estimations of rainfall at the paddock-scale, compared to the BoM rainfall records, or the SILO models.  Moreover, the radar-rainfall represents rainfall input across an area, rather than measured at a point, which is useful to understand the variation in where the rain fell, which can be used as a guide to the spatial variation in soil moisture. Being able to see the rainfall history also provides information on how much subsoil moisture there could be in the soil profile at different places across a farm or region.