Queensland

Averaged over the last 5-year (2015 to 2019) period, Queensland’s statewide mean annual temperature of 24.6°C was 1.4°C above the 1961–1990 average and the warmest since records began in 1910^†.

Each year from 2015 to 2019 was amongst the 7 warmest on record.

• 2017 was Queensland’s warmest year on record, the state-wide mean annual temperature (24.8°C) being +1.6°C above the 1961 to 1990 average.
• 2018 (+1.4°C above average) and 2019 (+1.3°C above average) were the fifth and sixth warmest years on record.

Long-term variability and trends

While records indicate Queensland’s statewide mean annual temperature has warmed by around +1°C since 1910, most of this warming has occurred over the past 50 to 60 years.

Taking 1960 as a reference year, the statewide mean annual temperature has risen at an average rate of about +0.3°C per decade, with mean daily minimum temperatures warming at a slightly higher rate than mean daily maximum temperatures.

The strongest warming since 1960 has been observed in inland parts of the state.

^†. The state-wide mean annual temperature is the average of the daily maximum and daily minimum.

The state-wide mean annual temperature (2015–2019) was calculated using mean annual temperatures for years 2015 through  to 2019. The publicly available ACORN-SAT datasets did not include data up to the end of 2019 at the time of publication. The mean annual temperature for 2019 was obtained from the Bureau of Meteorology. The Bureau’s process for calculating spatial means is described here.