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Data relating to
floods in South Australia between December 1836 and 2005 was collated into
a database and is available for download in two formats. Researchers
are advised that the data refers to articles on floods found in news
publications for the last 160 years and serious researchers will use
extracts of the data to reference the original news articles cited.
Detail Download
The first dataset can
be uploaded into Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and other data
management products (Access, MS-Excel, etc.) for manipulation by the
informed user. It is available as both a .csv and .txt file.
These files contain the following fields:
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Floodrecord
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unique identifier
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Name
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geographic location
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Latitude
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latitude (decimal
degrees)
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Longitude
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longitude (decimal
degrees)
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Source_Name
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name of newspaper
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Source_Author
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author of article
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Title_of_Article
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title of article
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Pagenumber
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page number of
article
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Date_of_Flood
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date of flood
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Date_of_Publication
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date of publication
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Nrm_Region
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Natural Resource
Management Region
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Catchment
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water catchment
(S.A.)
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Subcatchment
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subcatchment (S.A.)
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Postcode
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postcode
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Approximate
Elevation(M)
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approximate
elevation – meters
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The data is provided
to assist persons interested in carrying out further research on
floods. If the data is imported into a geographic information system,
be aware that although the data has been projected in GDA94, owing to the
various sources from which it has been derived, the accuracy should not be
considered to be less than 200 meters. The NRM, water catchments and
subcatchments referred to were provided by the Department of Water, Land
and Biodiversity Conservation as digital maps which were subsequently
used to determine within which NRM Region, catchment and subcatchment the
locations referred to occur.
Two types of
downloads (comma separated and database format) are provided for upload to
other software. The database format is a .dbf file that can be uploaded to
GIS systems such as ARC-GIS or MapInfo. With the GIS system active, upload the .dbf file from
the DVD drive using the following path: drive letter\web\html\data\FloodsSA.dbf
Note that if the .csv
data is uploaded to Excel, dates before 1900 will not be recognised. This is a design feature of Excel,
thus a sort on date of floods will not produce the required results for
floods occurring in the 1800’s.
Click to open Floods
in South Australia 1836-2005.csv 
Impacts Download
This second download
classifies flood reports according to their impact such as human death,
infrastructure damage, stock loss, etc. The impacts have not been
included in the Detail Download file since misinterpretation of the impacts
may occur.
For instance, a
single newspaper article may mention flooding in three suburbs, say
Burnside, Mitcham and Norwood and also mention that a death occurred.
If the attribute ‘death’ was included in the Detail Download, a database
query could have extracted three occurrences of ‘death’, one for
each suburb.
This MS Excel
formatted file allows filtering of the database according to the impacts
reported in 2,500 newspaper articles on flood events. As one article
may report multiple impacts (stock loss, infrastructure damage), the 2,500
articles are expanded to 13,000+ entries of unique entries in this file.
Click to open Flood
Impact Data 1836-2005.xls
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