Geoscience Australias GEOMACS model was utilised to produce hindcast hourly time series of continental shelf (~20 to 300 m depth) bed shear stress (unit of measure: Pascal, Pa) on a 0.1 degree grid covering the period March 1997 to February 2008 (inclusive). The hindcast data represents the combined contribution to the bed shear stress by waves, tides, wind and density-driven circulation. Included in the parameters that will be calculated to represent the magnitude of the bulk of the data are the quartiles of the distribution; Q25, Q50 and Q75 (i.e. the values for which 25, 50 and 75 percent of the observations fall below). The interquartile range, , of the GEOMACS output takes the observations from between Q25 and Q75 to provide an accurate representation of the spread of observations. The interquartile range was shown to provide a more robust representation of the observations than the standard deviation, which produced highly skewed observations (Hughes and Harris 2008). This dataset is a contribution to the CERF Marine Biodiversity Hub and is hosted temporarily by CMAR on behalf of Geoscience Australia.