New Bureau of Meteorology website

[John Smith]

For the other Australians out there that haven't noticed the new BoM website changes keep coming to light, including that they now show rain from midnight now, no longer 9am which has been in place for decades.

After seeing this I asked why and the response I got back was slightly more interesting than simply making the programming easier, the reply stated it was to align with forecasts, but didn't mention what that change will mean for the remaining manual stations that are usually read at 9am and 3pm.

Anyway, I thought others might like to know, if they didn't know already.

[Cameron D]

Thanks for that heads-up.

I notice the phone app still shows "rain since 9am" under the "current weather" section.

[John Smith]

A little birdy told me that the old site was quietly shifted to a sub-domain and it still shows rain since 9am...

https://reg.bom.gov.au

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[John Smith]

I've come across some more "interesting" design choices by the BoM for their new website.

Firstly rain observations are now grouped by hour, rather than showing individual readings, which in most cases was every half hour.

The new website no longer shows a running total for rain either, so you need to manually add up the hourly totals or check the high/low section for daily total (midnight to midnight of course)l.

I was told in no uncertain terms that this is intentional and they won't be reverting to how the old site worked.

Luckily for now the old site still functions the same as it did prior to the new site going live.

Weatherzone seems to still operate in the same manner as well, so some choices for now.

[Cameron D]

I have been downloading the station observation files  since about 2011, and there have been no changes since 2023.

Rain_trace  is still cumulative, starting at 9:00

[John Smith]

It's just the public/main website as best I can tell, historical data files still seem to be 9-9...

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[John Smith]

More poor decisions that BoM made when they had the new website coded, apart from rain being reported on the easy to access location pages as midnight to midnight and only hourly now even though there is at least half hourly records making rain rates misleading as well.

For example in early January on the old site the rain rate over the 30min period was at least 40.4mm/hr but because of the decision to report hourly on the new site the rain rate using that was only 22.2mm/hr because it all fell within 30 minutes. This can really matter during extreme rain fall events to predict if there will be flooding before river gauges start showing rising water levels.

Now I've been informed that minimum "overnight" temperatures are taken from 6 pm to 9 am so during summer the world seems like it's on fire because at 7pm in the evening it can be still over 35C in many locations such as yesterday which is totally misleading and confusing IMHO.

Maximum temperatures are 6am to 9pm which may seem sane but again can be misleading if it was warmer at midnight and a cool change has gone through.

[Greg from Oz]

Seems like the BOM is being run by people who nothing about the weather and the consequences of their decisions.

[Graham Eddy]

i think BOM is providing dumbed-down interface for unsophisticated consumers.

they have (expensive) products for commercial consumers.

this begs the question: where are the data feeds for the middle ground e.g. citizen scientists like us? i suspect BOM’s disregard of amateur weather statios (unlike UK WOW) relates to their commercial focus (guaranteed, high quality data streams)

⊣GE⊢

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[John Smith]

UK WOW is headed in the same direction that despite raving on about how useful the data is from hobbyists they now only care about getting it from station manufacturers which who knows how bad that may be when little johnny puts up something haphazardly on the balcony of his inner city apartment.

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[John Smith]

Forgot to bring up the UV forecasts BoM makes and they are usually too high and their UVI 3+ times usually start too early in the day and end too late in the evening. They seem to only use satellite readings rather than ground sensors and they have a disclaimer about cloud cover etc

I've come to realise that UVI isn't solely based on conditions on earth either, it's highly dependent on how active the sun is.

This summer the maximum UVI recorded was "only" 11.7 and we've had lots of cloudless skies this year yet last summer it hit 13.1 in January but the all time record was 15.8 during 2017 when the sun was supposed to be heading toward the minimum activity period of it's cycle but there were several maximum severity flares released that thankfully didn't head in our direction.

Both the highest maximum temperature I've recorded and the maximum recorded UVI happened on different days in February that year.

I've sent emails to the BoM about this and had no reply so they don't seem that interested in fixing their forecasts which is disappointing and yet again another misleading thing on their website.

I guess it'll only be downhill for their public facing website from here.