Objective classification of Australian climates

Köppen’s scheme to classify world climates was devised in 1918 by Dr Wladimir Köppen of the University of Graz in Austria. Over the decades it has achieved wide acceptance amongst climatologists. However, the scheme has also had its share of critics, who have challenged the scheme's validity on a number of grounds. For example, Köppen’s rigid boundary criteria often lead to large discrepancies between climatic subdivisions and features of the natural landscape. Furthermore, whilst some of his boundaries have been chosen largely with natural landscape features in mind, other boundaries have been chosen largely with human experience of climatic features in mind. The present paper presents a modification of Köppen’s classification that addresses some of the concerns and illustrates this modification with its application to Australia.