Forecast fallout: BOM radar disaster

As large parts of the country face intense weather emergencies the Bureau of Meteorology is facing severe backlash after a new weather radar system failed its first big storm season test. 

For more, 7News Meteorologist Tony Auden joins.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
As large parts of the country phase intense weather emergencies,
The Bureau of Meteorology is facing severe backlash after a
new weather radar system failed its first big storm season test.
It's all about the bomb's new website and the way
it displays storm intensity. Because of the recent changes, thousands

(00:21):
of residents underestimated the severity of widespread thunderstorms which have
torn through the East Coast this week. For more, we're
joined by seven News meteorologist Tony Orden live in Brisbane.
Morning to you, So this is all about the new
radar color scheme. Can you explain how things went wrong?

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Good morning Nat. Well, it's hard to think that a
simple change of colours could lead to so much confusion
and potentially danger, but in this case, that's absolutely the
case of what happened on Sunday. Many people based off
this new radar color scheme of orange. It peaked at orange.
We're expecting a garden variety storm. Instead, they were hit
by a massive supercell bringing in some cases hail up

(01:01):
to tennis ball size. Win us to one hundred k's
now and I had friends with power lines down over
their driveway with young kids in the house as well.
They weren't expecting it. The radar just simply did not
do the job based on what we had there. Now
at the moment, we can see what is our Channel
seven radar color scheme. I've spent a lot of time
in here really refining those colors. So we have that
black coll people know where the worst of the storm is,

(01:23):
where that hal core is at any particular point in time.
The warnings are a handy well resource to have as well,
but they're only issued very ad hoc, say every thirty
to sixty minutes, so that radar is really really important.
And on Sunday it let a lot of people down.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah, we might get the control roone to bring that.
Both those shots up again. So we've got the old
on the left, the new on the right. So the
black bit on the ole the center of that that
would usually signify hail, wouldn't it, And the new one
doesn't show that, So people didn't think it would be
that bad. Is that sort of the summary?

Speaker 2 (01:55):
That's right? So thanks to Anthony Cornelis metiorologist, I respect
to put this graphic together. On the left we have
the old radar. It shows the raw reading from the
radar and decert bells. It was always understood, not an
official term, that black shows hail and a severe storm.
On the right, they've changed it to an estimated millimeters
per hour. In a new interface, you can zoom it.
You can do some things that seem great, but the

(02:17):
data was slow and without really educating everyone. You can
see an orange looking storm based on that old scale
just does not look very severe.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
Okay, so what does the bomb do? Do they go
back to the old one.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
I'd argue that we need the new and the old
in parallel. They've spent a lot of time and money,
presumably on this new system. We need to be able
to get used to it, but we also need to
safely find all of that information that we've been accessing
for pretty much the last twenty years pretty easily. So
perhaps a total where where you can have new and old.
We need more than just a couple of weeks of
a beta test to then have a completely new system

(02:49):
thrown on us. It's like going to the supermarket when
they've laid it all out. I can't find the eggs.
I have no idea it is. And there are tens
of thousands of pages on this bureau website.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
Okay, Tony, can you just talk to them and then
you can get back to us.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
Maybe's my dear, I'll trauma b mm hm