I'm Blair Trewin. I'm a climate scientist with the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne, and I work with long-term observed historic datasets. 

The Bureau has been a world leader in the development of long-term climate datasets. There are many areas where we've been a pioneer, especially daily datasets which are suitable for analysing extremes.

[Images of meteorological instruments]

The Bureau has about 700 sites around Australia that record temperatures every day, and about 6000 sites that report rainfall. 

[Blair opens a door to check the temperature; later lifts up the rain guage.]

The monitoring of weather is very important in helping us understand the long-term climate. We can see how what's happening now fits into the context of what's happened historically.

[Images of weather in country locations]

Well, we've seen some things happen in recent years which are outside the range of historical experience, and especially with temperature. We've seen that 2013 was Australia's hottest year on record. We've seen heatwaves where records have been set in many parts of the country. 

[Images in the city in action e.g. trams, people walking around in summer clothes, one person sheltering under a shirt on her head.]

There's a clear warming trend for temperature over the last 50 to 100 years, particularly the last 50, over virtually all of Australia. And what we've seen in the last few years is well outside the range of the variability we saw before that.

[Images of a dry landscape, also the sun]

[Animation of a temperature graph since 1910 with an upward trend. The label says: Australia has warmed by around 1°C since 1910.]