While reading yet another article yesterday on problems at the Bureau of Meteorology since launching their new website, I couldn’t help noticing how closely it matched my own experience when providing feedback to the Bureau of Meteorology. I’m not worried that the website changed, however the Bureau seems to keep making things worse not better.
The Bureau’s new website simplifies the weather too much and I gravely fear that this will end up costing lives similar to the summer of 2010/2011 in Grantham, Qld where 12 people died. Readings from a gauge at the time were so high that they were thought to be wrong, since water levels couldn’t possibly rise that fast. Unfortunately they did.
Knowing rain rates is good for estimating what river levels might be, giving the SES crucial time to warn people about flooding before the next Grantham happens.
The Bureau‘s old website had more rain readings shown, the new website only shows hourly totals. On the 5th of January this year 20mm fell in less than 30 minutes so 40mm/hr. The new website showed only half that. As Inverell and other locations in the region suffer flash flooding, this is important to know.
Even before the Bureau was created in 1908, rain totals were taken daily in the morning. This turned into “24 hours to 9 am”. Most people don’t know that the new website gives rain totals from midnight for the research station west of town. Manual readings at Raglan St, Inverell are still taken at 9am confusing people.
The new website has a section for New South Wales highs and lows. The highest overnight minimum is taken between 6pm and 9am. So checking on today after 6pm during summer when the sun hasn’t set and the temperature is still rising this decision will damage the Bureau’s reputation as they can’t get the basics right by showing the actual minimum temperature for that day.
The Bureau uses satellites for UV forecasts and those forecasts in January were for a maximum of 14 most days, but the Inverell district hasn’t recorded a level that high since 2022. The Bureau doesn’t have any plans to make the forecasts better. Those forecasts are then used by the Victorian Cancer Council’s Sun Smart website with people then wasting money on sunscreen that’s not needed.
There seems to be a never ending list of problems coming from the Bureau after almost a billion dollars of tax payer money was spent. What’s worst, instead of fixing problems and making their website better, the Bureau just doubles down defending poor decisions.
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