If you make this claim, be prepared for the hate storm when it gets it wrong for some marginalised community.
Also, the lack of warning processes in flood contexts means the BoM can claim it gets the rain forecast right, but the downstream flood alerts which lie in the hands of 3 tiers of government still break down. Who gets the blame? EVERYONE including the BoM.
I love the BoM. But, I worry about them too. They could be defunded for political gain.
Also: their app is crap and for bizarre reasons they still offer their weather radar in the best, most simplest, 1990s internet form over http:// urls because of the overhang of farm equipment which can't handle TLS https: connections. There is a good https: service but they modernised the UX. I would prefer the 1990s style, but delivered over secure transport. (browsers now routinely preference https: urls so you wind up with an interstitial delay. minor nit only)
If you use windy, or willyweather, it's federating BoM data with other sources.
An event I was recently supposed to go to was called off because the BoM forecast rain all day 3 days out. Google Weather said it would be dry and sunny. It was dry and sunny. It's an anecdote not data, but so far I'm not understanding the national obsession based on this and a few other personal experiences.
I, and many other Australian's, like public institutions without a profit motive. Gutting these institutions usually ends up with worse privately operated ones.
It's a horrendous impedence mismatch. I did debate not directly putting right-wing into this, but my personal experience of speaking to people in the farming sector who are sharing hate on the BoM is that it's driven in right wing political agenda about "big government" and "world government" and "my tax dollars"
I think the parent comment goes some way to explaining something I find bizarre - the "extreme weather warnings" from the BoM, which they issue for every light breeze. I even have a fabric gazebo erected in my back yard, held down only by sandbags at the corners, and I don't have to disassemble it for every BoM "extreme weather warning" for wind/storms.
There are so many "extreme weather warnings" for wind that they'd be meaningless for everyone who's not in a small boat.
But you're right, I think it was a sensationalist tabloid talking point to say "Michael Fish missed the hurricane" but he was a well loved weatherman.
One of my astro chums at Bracknell rode a thumpingly noisy 4 stroke indian with a side-car, smoked hand-rolled menthol cigarettes and appeared to want to become Patrick Moore in size and demeanour. I like to think he fitted in well.
You have no reason to. They're not a well-run, efficient organisation, even by government department standards.
> over http:// urls because of the overhang of farm equipment which can't handle TLS https: connections.
This is the public narrative, and is a brazen lie.
THERE IS NO SUCH FARMING EQUIPMENT!
Certainly not in 2025.
Their site DOES HAVE a certificate, and supports HTTPS, right now.
They just refuse to let you use it, redirecting a successful HTTPS connection back to HTTP.
If there was farming equipment (Which models? Vendors? Affecting how many farmers?) out there they would be broken right now because port 443 is open and listening. If they can connect to port 443, then they don't need to be redirected back to port 80 because they worked. If they can only connect to port 80, then the presence of port 443 makes no difference.
I keep pointing this out, and "true blue aussies that looooove the BoM" keep arguing about this. The BoM spends hundreds of millions on IT, tens of millions on consultancies like Accenture, but they can't manage a $50 certificate and a bog standard HTTP/HTTPS endpoint.
My iPhone, right now, can't connect to most BoM web pages because of this stupid, stupid issue! There is no mystical broken farming equipment, but there definitely are inconvenienced users like me!
After putting up this rant for years and years in various forums, a former BoM employee finally fessed up -- they were the one that tried switching HTTP to HTTPS years ago and "broke" their internal systems. Not non-existent farming equipment, it was BoM's own internal services that fell over.
Why?
Because they hadn't updated any of it in decades, and the software was so old that it couldn't handle "modern" cipher suites and TLS versions. Modern being "newer than SSL 3.0"... in 2015.
That's not the sign of a competently run organisation worthy of admiration.
The BoM caused hundreds of millions of $ of damage to livestock farming - they warned about a huge drought in 2022 causing massive livestock culling. Instead there were years of above-average rainfall.
If you know a climate/weather bureau of comparable scale of footprint doing a better job, we'd all like to know. AFAIK there isn't one: most of the alternates work in different scale, with different climate forcing functions.
I know no one wants to advertise their mistakes, but showing a history of your accuracy which was transparently updated would build more credibility with the public than anything else. Perhaps someone is scraping this info and posting it?
Even a site that displays 'just' recent weather specifics (sans how the forecast was) would be quite helpful.
e.g., the hourly precipitation for the last week or month.
Am NOT talking about generalized monthly climate data, fwiw.
Anyone?
It’s experimental, and selecting weather stations is a little clunky, but it has some really cool info that’s hard to find other places.
https://apps.gsl.noaa.gov/nbmviewer/?col=2&hgt=1&obs=true&fo...
Edit:
This GEFS plume viewer is cool, too.
https://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/users/meg/gefs_plumes/index.ht...
You can check a box to plot observations and then pick an older “cycle”.
Both are limited to the US.
https://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/2009/historical...
https://www.reddit.com/r/meteorology/comments/1crs6lu/seekin...
(These aren't "sites" that display the past data, just datasets you can download.)
On https://weather-sense.leftium.com, you can see the daily forecasts change on a regular basis.
Weather prediction should be quantitative.
TL;DR: That's nice.
Weather forecast distribution is by "news". News is deployed at mostly fixed intervals.
Anecdote: In Yeovil, Somerset, UK. The topography here (its quite hilly here in a county with some fairly famous "levels") means that it can be pissing down with rain on one side of the town and be dry on the other side and so on.
Weather forecasting is a quite hard problem. The really hard problem is delivering it.
We want to pick the best nights during an observing window based on the weather in 12 locations around the world. These are mostly locations on the peaks of mountains, where it's hard to do a good forecast because the ground is rugged on length scales that are smaller than the grid in the numerical computation.
Forecast accuracy has improved in recent years, but I'm really looking forward to AI forecasts. They appear to fix some systematic errors that are still present in traditional forecast simulations.
- The chance of precipitation line tends to gradually go up and then back down over several hours.
- The expected mm of precipitation bars tend to be more actionable: the chance of precipitation may be high, but if the expected amount is low you are not likely to experience much, if any rain; much less need an umbrella.
- Sample screen shot with precipitation in forecast: https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/e003badb-4832-430...
---
https://openweathermap.org even gives minutely rain forecasts for the next hour.
Linked is that definition explained:
My solution was to reduce days to average temperature and sun hours instead of using precip to visualize a full day. And then focus on a "24 hour display" with 24 little icons where the rain instantly seemed a lot less.
Basically focusing on the good things.
You will find out how urban areas behave differently than rural ones, how plains differ from hills and mountains, how forest differs from meadows, where the small cumulus clouds are being formed and where they disappear, how wind shifts before the storm, how animals change their behavior etc. Some of this stuff can be widely applicable, but some will be specific to your area. And you do not even need to live in some remote areas to enjoy it.
bmink•8mo ago
I’m in SF and I have not looked at a “TV/app style” forecast in years. Instead every morning I read:
https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?format=CI&glossary=...
During the day I look periodically at:
https://fog.today
vrosas•8mo ago
mplanchard•8mo ago
fred_is_fred•8mo ago
ttobbaybbob•8mo ago
hnburnsy•8mo ago
Hourly Weather Forecast Graph (48 hours)
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=28.4963&lon=-8...
XML Version
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=28.4963&lon=-8...
hnburnsy•8mo ago
NWSNOW for Android, includes the vaunted "Forecast Discussion". Side load, No ads, no tracking, pure NWS and NOAA data.
https://www.nwsnow.net/
gdryke•8mo ago
The `<pre>` on the NWS site was really messy on mobile, this is nice and neat. Feel free to fork it and use your own, or this link should work for your NWS site too!
https://greg_dryke--0816a61c279c11f09d52569c3dd06744.web.val...
(No promises on possible future changes if you do start using it, but it's pretty stable.)
jimmaswell•8mo ago
deepsun•8mo ago