Step 1 of 9
Understanding the Basics of the Inigo Jones Method
The core idea, the man behind it, and why the approach is testable
Who was Inigo Jones
Inigo Jones was born in 1872 in Ireland and migrated to Australia as a young man. He died in 1954. For most of his working life he was based in Queensland, and the weather station he ran at Crohamhurst, near Woodford, was about 30km from Dayboro as the crow flies. A near neighbour by Queensland standards.
He came to weather forecasting the way most serious observers do: out of necessity. Queensland farmers in the early 1900s had no satellites, no numerical models, nothing BOM could give them that was any use six weeks out. They were waiting on rain, and nobody could tell them whether it was coming. Jones spent decades trying to change that.
He started publishing long range forecasts in the 1920s. They became well known among Queensland farmers, particularly in the grain and pastoral country further west. He was not operating on the fringes. He worked within the Queensland government's meteorological system and published in academic contexts. You can find references to his work in Queensland state archives going back to the 1930s.
What he built wasn't a model in the numerical sense. It was a pattern recognition system, grounded in over 60 years of his own observation and a much longer historical record he assembled from ship logs, station diaries, and colonial weather records. By the time he died in 1954 he had one of the longest continuous Queensland rainfall datasets in existence.
Queensland growers still want the same thing he was giving them: a read on the season before it arrives. If you're coming at this from a gardening angle rather than a meteorology one, the planting guides at Garden Buddy are calibrated to the same climate zones we forecast for, and pair well with a monthly outlook.
The core idea
Jones noticed that certain years of extreme weather, droughts, floods, and exceptional seasons, tended to recur in patterns. And those patterns correlated wiht specific astronomical configurations involving the outer planets and solar activity.
His core argument was this: the outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) generate strong magnetic fields. When these planets align in particular configurations, they influence the solar wind. The solar wind in turn affects the circulation of Earth's upper atmosphere. Change the upper atmosphere's circulation and you change where the rain falls.
Is that mechanism proven to the standard of modern physics? No. The causal chain he proposed has not been established in peer reviewed literature to a level that would satisfy a climate scientist. I want to be straight about that.
What has been established is that the correlations he found in the historical record are real, measurable, and they repeat. Whether the physical mechanism is correct is a separate question from whether the patterns are there. I work with the patterns. I'm still waiting for anyone to produce a better explanation for why they show up.
This is a pattern recognition method, not a mechanism based model. That distinction matters. A mechanism based model tells you why something happens. A pattern recognition method tells you what has tended to happen when conditions are similar. Both are useful. They answer different questions.
The key cycles Jones tracked
There are five main cycles in the Jones framework. Each operates on a different timescale, and they compound in ways that make some years more predictable than others.
The 11 year Schwabe cycle
The most visible sunspot cycle. Well documented since the 1840s. Solar activity rises to a peak (solar maximum) roughly every 11 years, then falls to a quiet period (solar minimum), then rises again. The cycle length varies between about 9 and 14 years, so the 11 year figure is an average. We're currently in Solar Cycle 25, which started in December 2019 and peaked around late 2024 to early 2025.
The 22 year Hale cycle
Two Schwabe cycles end to end. After 22 years, the Sun's magnetic polarity returns to its starting orientation. Jones found this more significant for rainfall patterns than the 11 year cycle alone, particularly for alternating wet and dry periods in subtropical Queensland. We're currently in the positive Hale phase.
The 35 year Brückner cycle
Discovered by Eduard Brückner in the 1890s, this cycle shows up in lake levels, river flows, and rainfall records across multiple continents. Brückner wasn't working with astronomical data, he was working with the climate record itself, and the 35 year periodicity kept appearing. Jones incorporated it into his framework. We're roughly in year 25 of the current cycle, which puts us in a transitional phase from wetter to drier tendency.
The 60 year combined cycle
When the Schwabe, Hale, and Brückner cycles are all near their respective phase points simultaneously, the signal compounds. Jones placed significant weight on this. We're in year 46 or so of the current 60 year cycle, which historically corresponds to a drying tendency in southern Queensland before a return to wetter conditions in the late cycle years.
The 178 year Jose cycle
The longest cycle Jones tracked. Paul Jose described it in 1965, after Jones had died, but Jones had independently identified a similar periodicity from the historical record. The Jose cycle governs the Sun's motion around the solar system's barycentre (the common centre of mass of the whole solar system, which the Sun actually orbits rather than sitting still at the centre). The full cycle of about 178 years is beyond any individual weather station's recording history, so we work with it largely from extended climate proxies.
| Cycle | Length | Current position (2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Schwabe | ~11 years | Solar Cycle 25, declining phase post peak 2024–2025 |
| Hale | ~22 years | Positive polarity phase (same as Cycles 1, 3, 5... 25) |
| Brückner | ~35 years | Year ~25 of current cycle, transitioning to drier tendency |
| 60 year combined | ~60 years | Year ~46, historical drying tendency before late cycle return |
| Jose | ~178 years | Mid cycle, extended proxy records only |
How we apply this at Dayboro
We've been running the station on Lyndhurst Hill since 2004. That's 21 years of local data we can correlate against astronomical configurations. It's not a long record by climate science standards, but it's a continuous, well maintained one, which matters more than length up to a point.
We also use BoM historical records for Queensland going back to the 1890s. That's where the pattern matching work happens. You look at the current cycle configuration, find years in the historical record where the configuration was similar, and look at what Queensland weather did in those analogue years. That's the process we document in Steps 6 and 7.
Our version of the Jones method is reverse engineered from his published outputs and his documented reasoning, combined with Jean Meeus's Astronomical Algorithms for the actual calculations. We did not copy anyone else's forecast spreadsheet. The calculations, the analogue selection, and the weighting decisions are all ours.
Honest about what we don't know: the mechanism is debated, the cycle lengths are averages that vary, and the analogue selection involves judgment calls that different practitioners would make differently. We test it every month and publish the results. The scorecard is public. You can see exactly where we've been right and where we haven't.
Before you go further
If you want to replicate this, Step 2 covers the data you need before you can do any of the calculations. That's where to go next.