Ten years of Australian weather, year by year

By Julia · weather-au.com editorial team · Published 23 October 2026 · 5 min read

Australian weather is usually described in averages, and averages hide the thing that decides how a year feels: the swings between years. The last ten years contain a long dry stretch, a run of three wet years, and a stretch of warm ones. This article walks through them in order, using daily ERA5 reanalysis for Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Hobart, calendar years 2016 to 2025.

One caution first. ERA5 is a reanalysis: a weather model constrained by observations, on a grid of about 25 kilometres. It follows the year-to-year story well but it is not a station, and its rain totals can differ from a rain gauge. For official records, the Bureau of Meteorology is the reference.

2016 to 2019: a warm, drying run

The first four years are not dramatic city by city, which is the point. Sydney sits 0.7 °C above its own ten-year mean in 2016 and Brisbane 0.5 °C above, then both slide back to the average. What changes is rain. Sydney receives 634 mm in 2018, 72% of the site's 1991–2020 normal of 879 mm, and 667 mm in 2019. Brisbane's 2019 total is 474 mm, its lowest of the decade and only 55% of its normal of 855 mm.

Canberra, which is not in the table below but is in the same archive, has the same pattern in 2019: 378 mm against a normal of 568 mm, and the warmest year of the ten at +0.7 °C over its own mean. In Darwin, the calendar year 2019 brings 837 mm, not even half the 1,823 mm normal. Heat arrives with the dryness: in 2019 Adelaide counts 22 days at 35 °C or more and Melbourne 17, the highest values either city reaches in the decade.

2020 to 2022: three wet years

Then the sign flips, and it flips almost everywhere at once. Across the six cities and the three years there are 18 city-years, and 16 of them are wetter than that city's ten-year mean. The two exceptions are Perth in 2020 (596 mm against a mean of 692 mm) and Adelaide in 2021 (628 mm against 660 mm). The run is clearest on the east coast and in the south-east.

The wettest year of the decade is 2022 in Sydney (1,588 mm, 181% of normal), Melbourne (1,124 mm, 182%), Brisbane (1,925 mm, 225%), Adelaide (904 mm, 185%) and Hobart (960 mm, 152%). Canberra's wettest year is also 2022, at 1,071 mm. Perth is the exception: its wettest year is 2025, with 956 mm.

The temperature chart shows the other half of the signature. In 2021 and 2022 all five cities in the chart are below their own ten-year mean, and the eastern ones by the most: Sydney −0.8 °C in 2021, Brisbane −0.9 °C in 2022, Melbourne −0.6 °C in 2021. More rain, more cloud, cooler days. That combination is what scientists associate with La Niña years on the east coast, but a reanalysis total does not tell you the phase of the Pacific: the Bureau publishes that diagnosis, and our data only shows the footprint.

2023 to 2025: warmer, and wet again in the west

Rainfall relaxes in 2023, a near-normal year in Sydney (876 mm) and Brisbane (800 mm). Temperature then climbs. In 2024 Perth averages 19.6 °C, the highest of the ten years and 1.1 °C above its own mean: the largest single-year anomaly in the whole table. Perth is also the one city whose last three years, 18.8 °C, 19.6 °C and 19.0 °C, are its three warmest of the ten, against 18.0 °C in 2016.

2025 is the surprise: warm and wet. Melbourne reaches 15.3 °C, the warmest of its ten, with 805 mm. Brisbane collects 1,615 mm, Perth its wettest year at 956 mm, and Sydney 1,263 mm. Hobart is the odd one out: 12.4 °C is close to its mean of 12.5 °C, but 548 mm is its third-driest year after 2017 (492 mm) and 2019 (528 mm).

What the decade teaches

• A year can be far from the normal in either direction. Sydney spans 634 mm to 1,588 mm in ten years, and Brisbane runs from 55% to 225% of its normal; planning around a single "average" year would have been wrong almost every time.
• The decade is not the normal. Averaged over 2016–2025, Brisbane gets 1,135 mm against a site normal of 855 mm. Part of that is real (the wet years), part may be a difference between the normals' pipeline and the daily archive. Compare years inside the archive with each other, not against the normal.
• Temperature moves in fractions, rain in multiples. A warm year is 0.5 to 1 °C above the mean; a wet year can be double the rain.
• Heat and dryness travel together. 2019 has the most 35 °C days of the decade in both Adelaide and Melbourne; it is also Melbourne's driest year (597 mm) and Adelaide's third driest (527 mm).

The practical consequence is simple. If you are choosing a month, use the normals (see our month-by-month guide, When to visit Australia). If you are asking what a bad summer looks like, look at the 35 °C days. Both are drawn from the same source and period as the numbers on this page.

Period of the data cited: 2016–2025.