Climate change analysis requires datasets that not only cover a long span of time, but are also homogeneous through time. A homogeneous climate record is one in which all observed climate variations are due to the behaviour of the atmosphere, not other influences, such as changes in location, exposure of the observation site, instrumentation type or measuring procedure.

Dedicated datasets, carefully curated from weather station sites with long-records and subjected to complex quality control to address inconsistencies and errors, have been developed for this purpose.

Climate change tracker uses the Australian Climate Observations Reference Network – Surface Air Temperature (ACORN-SAT) dataset (temperature) and other high-quality datasets (rainfall, cloud amount and pan evaporation).