On Australian heat waves: Time series analysis of extreme temperature events in Australia, 1950-2005

This paper presents a statistical analysis of daily maximum temperatures and humidity records for selected Australian cities and rural stations, with a focus on the trends of Australian heat waves since 1950. The two datasets were used to extract the time series of “maximum apparent body temperatures” (also referred to as the yearly-worst heat wave indices) in order to quantify the trends, spatial distribution and statistical significance over the continent. The Mann-Kendall’s (MK) nonparametric test and Sen’s slope estimation techniques were used to quantify the overall statistical significance of the results