Todd Weather Folios

The Todd Weather Folios are a collection of continental Australian synoptic charts that were published from 1879 to 1909.

The charts were created by Sir Charles Todd's office at the Adelaide Observatory. In addition to the charts, the folios include clippings of newspaper articles and telegraphic and handwritten information about the weather. The area covered is mainly the east and south-east of Australia, with occasional reference to other parts of Australasia and the world. The maps are bound into approximately six-month folios, 63 of which cover the entire period. There are approximately 10,000 continental weather maps along with 750 rainfall maps for South Australia, 10 million printed words of news text, and innumerable handwritten observations and correspondences about the weather.

The folios are an earlier part of the National Archives of Australia listed collection series number D1384.

With the advent of the telegraph it was possible to simultaneously collect data, such as surface temperature and sea-level pressure, to draw synoptic weather charts. With Charles Todd's appointment as Postmaster General to the Colony, he trained not only his telegraph operators, but also his postmasters as weather observers. These observers provided valuable data points that, in combination with telegraphed observations from the other colonies (including New Zealand), showed the development and progress of weather activity across a large part of the Southern Hemisphere. Todd's best known feat was his construction management of the Overland Telegraph from Adelaide to Port Darwin. This line of communication was critical to his capacity to create continent-wide synoptic charts as the telegraphic observations from the Outback enabled the connection of data points on the east coast of Australia with similar data points on the west and southern coasts. These continent-scale isobaric lines allowed Todd and his staff to draw synoptic charts that in the early 1880s had a greater breadth than any (known) synoptic charts drawn elsewhere in the world.

The folios grew out of Todd’s desire to inform the colonists of South Australia of the immense size of weather systems and that in southern Australia, they generally progressed from west to east and not from east to west as commonly assumed by the early colonists. To accomplish this, Todd displayed daily the last 6 synoptic charts for public viewing then bound and stored them in the folios. The Todd weather folios consist not only of synoptic charts, but also include clippings from newspapers detailing weather statistics and events for all the eastern colonies of Australia. Newspapers from Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne were collected as they came off the inter-colonial trains and were processed for pasting up next to the corresponding synoptic chart.

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