The Australian Capital Territory Branch of the Statistical Society will be holding its next meeting on Tuesday 28th April in person and online via Zoom. For those attending in person, there will be the opportunity to meet for dinner afterwards in Canberra City.
Date: Tuesday 28th April 2026
Time: 5:45pm (AEST) followed by dinner (details below)
Venue: Allan Barton Forum, Level 2, ANU College of Business & Economics, Building 26C, The Australian National University (ANU Building 26C)
Online by Zoom: https://anu.zoom.us/j/89097977503?pwd=kzflDfWJLSKBn917WBW1LEcd2WTbKE.1
NB: registration not required for this event
Title: Monthly Rainfall Data in the Murray Darling Basin: A Journey through Space and Time
The Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) is an important agricultural area in southeastern Australia that produces more than a third of Australia’s food supply and therefore understanding rainfall patterns in this area is crucial. This talk will give an overview of the various analyses that we have conducted on a set of monthly rainfall data obtained from a network of weather stations in the MDB. The data are part of the Australian climate change site networks that include several high-quality weather datasets and are available from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The monthly rainfall data are spatio-temporal in nature, and our analyses have included methods for modelling the data, producing predictions in both space and time, and imputing missing values.
[co-authors: Gen Nowak, Alan Welsh, Lingbing Feng, Pierre Dutilleul, Terry O'Neill]
Presenter: Gen Nowak
Gen Nowak is a Senior Lecturer in Statistics in the Research School of Finance, Actuarial Studies and Statistics at ANU. His research focuses on developing and applying statistical methodologies to answer questions in a variety of fields including cancer research and climate change. He has worked on statistical applications in lung cancer and breast cancer and has developed various spatio-temporal models for analysing rainfall.
Dinner: After the talk, there will be a dinner at 7.15pm at Bistro Nguyen's, 78-80 Alinga St, Canberra
If you plan to attend the dinner, please RSVP by 5:00 pm on Monday 27 April by entering your details in the SSA ACT Branch dinner attendance sheet, or by contacting Warren at wjmstats@outlook.com or 0407 916 868. Please treat your RSVP as a firm commitment rather than an expression of interest.
If you need to withdraw after the deadline, please remove your name from the attendance sheet and notify Warren by phone or text on 0407 916 868. Please note that last-minute requests to attend during the event cannot be accommodated, so be sure to RSVP through the attendance sheet in advance.
NOTE: SSA ACT branch are offering discounts to SSA early career and student members who attend dinner! For this meeting, dinners will be a fixed charge of $15 for student members and $25 for early career members.
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