The Three Chart Types

Every Inigo Jones forecast is built on three overlapping charts: a temperature chart, an air movement chart, adn a moisture chart. This step covers the first two. Step 5 handles moisture, which is complex enough to deserve its own page.

The three charts are not independent. They work together. A temperature chart that says "cool quarter" and an air movement chart showing "sustained southerly" reinforce each other. When they point in opposite directions, you get uncertainty, and you should say so in the forecast. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. First, build the charts.

The Temperature Chart

The temperature chart is structured around the four quarterly periods defined by the Sun entering the cardinal zodiacal signs. In the Southern Hemisphere, these mark the start of each meteorological season. The dates shift slightly year to year but are always close to:

• Sun enters Aries: around 20 March. Start of autumn.
• Sun enters Cancer: around 21 June. Start of winter.
• Sun enters Libra: around 23 September. Start of spring and storm season.
• Sun enters Capricorn: around 22 December. Start of summer and the wet season.

Each of these four periods becomes one column in the temperature chart. That gives you four main divisions per year. For Dayboro, the Libra and Capricorn quarters are the ones worth watching most carefully. September through March is when the big rain events happen, adn when the temperature anomalies really drive agricultural outcomes.

What goes inside each quarterly column

For each quarterly period, you record three things at the start of that quarter: the position of the outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune), the current phase of the sunspot cycle, adn whether any significant planetary aspects fall within the period. Conjunctions and oppositions are the ones Jones weighted most heavily. Squares get noted but weighted lower.

Then, for each past year in your historical record, you note the actual temperatures recorded during that quarter. Not every day. The quarterly average, adn specifically the anomaly from the historical average for that quarter. Over time you build a table: when planetary configuration X was in effect, the quarterly average temperature tended to run Y degrees above or below the mean.

The table below shows a simplified version of what this looks like. In practice your rows will go back decades, not four years.

The anomaly column is what you're actually forecasting. Everything else is the explanatory variable. When you've got 30 or 40 years of rows, patterns start to show up. Which planetary configurations correlate with warmer than average conditions? Which with cooler? It's not causal proof. It's a pattern library.

The Air Movement Chart

Air movement in Jones's method is governed by Mercury's zodiacal position. Mercury moves fast, completing a full zodiac circuit in about 88 days. It changes signs roughly every 7 to 23 days, the range being wide because Mercury's orbit is elliptical adn its apparent speed from Earth is uneven. It speeds up, slows down, appears to reverse during retrograde periods.

Each zodiacal sign Mercury occupies corresponds to a forecast period for wind direction adn air mass type. Jones's original work was done for Queensland, which means the sign associations he built up are actually more relevant here than they would be if you applied the method in Europe or North America.

The three air mass patterns that matter for Dayboro

You're not trying to forecast every wind shift. You're forecasting which of three broad regime types will dominate over a 7 to 14 day period:

• Northerly and north easterly: maritime tropical air from the Coral Sea, warm adn moist, associated with summer rainfall. When this regime dominates, the D'Aguilar Range is catching that moisture and we're getting rain up here before the valley floor sees much.
• Southerly and south westerly: continental air, dry and cooler, associated with winter ridge patterns. These are the fronts that come through in July and August and give Dayboro its cold nights.
• Easterly: trade wind pattern. Generally stable but capable of producing orographic rainfall on the range when moisture levels are up. The easterly pattern is the one that can give Dayboro a wet day while Samford stays dry.

Building the air movement chart

List all Mercury sign changes for your forecast year. You can get these from any good ephemeris, or from online tools like Astro.com. For each sign entry, note: the date Mercury enters the sign, which sign it is, adn the historical weather tendency during Mercury in that sign under similar sunspot cycle conditions. That last qualifier matters. The same Mercury sign under solar minimum conditions may show a different tendency than under solar maximum.

Mercury retrograde periods complicate things. Retrograde happens three times per year, roughly three weeks each time. Mercury appears to move backward through the zodiac during these periods. Jones noted them as transition zones with weaker weather signals. Some practitioners skip them entirely. I weight them at 40% of a direct-motion reading. You'll need to decide for yourself once you've got enough data to compare outcomes.

Combining the Charts

The temperature chart gives you the seasonal baseline. Is this quarter likely to run warmer or cooler than average? The air movement chart gives you the finer tendency within the season: which periods within that quarter are likely to bring which wind regime?

Together, they form a framework. The moisture chart (Step 5) fills in the rainfall dimension. Until you've got all three, you don't have a forecast. You have half a forecast, which is arguably worse than no forecast, because it looks complete when it isn't.

How We Lay It Out

We use a spreadsheet. Nothing fancy. Rows for each past year, columns for each quarter. Conditional formatting so cells show green for warmer than average, blue for cooler. This makes it easy to scan for patterns across decades without doing the mental work each time.

For the air movement chart: a separate sheet with rows for each Mercury sign entry in the forecast year, columns for the comparison years we've identified, adn a final column for the forecast tendency. We add a confidence column: high, moderate, low. Low means fewer than 5 good analogues or high variance in the comparison set. High means 10 or more analogues pointing the same direction.

Jones himself did all of this with pen adn ledger paper. His original workbooks are held at the University of Queensland. I've seen photographs of them. Dense handwritten tables, no formatting, just decades of numbers accumulating. The method works on paper. The spreadsheet just makes it faster to search adn update.

Once you've built the temperature adn air movement charts, you've got the structural skeleton of the forecast. Step 5 adds the moisture dimension. Step 6 covers how to find the pattern matches in the historical record that actually tell you what the weather is likely to do.