Bureau of Meteorology

The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM or BoM) is an executive agency of the Australian Government that is responsible for providing weather forecasts and meteorological services to Australia and neighbouring countries. It was established in 1906 under the Meteorology Act (Cth), and brought together the state meteorological services that existed before then. The states officially transferred their weather recording responsibilities to the Bureau of Meteorology on 1 January 1908.

History

The Bureau of Meteorology was established on 1 January 1908 following the passage of the ''Meteorology Act 1906''. Prior to Federation in 1901, each colony had had its own meteorological service, with all but two colonies also having a subsection devoted to astronomy. In August 1905, federal home affairs minister Littleton Groom surveyed state governments for their willingness to cede control, finding South Australia and Victoria unwilling. However, at a ministerial conference in April 1906, the state governments agreed to transfer responsibility for meteorology and astronomy to the federal government. Groom rejected a takeover of astronomy due to its connection to universities, which relied on state legislation for their authority.

Henry Ambrose Hunt was appointed as the first Commonwealth Meteorologist in November 1906. Initially, the Bureau had few staff and issued a single daily forecast for each state, transmitted by Morse code to country areas. Radio forecasts were introduced in 1924. The Bureau received additional funding from the late 1930s, in the lead-up to World War II, and it was incorporated into the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) from 1941 until after the conclusion of the war. It became an inaugural member of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1950. Televised weather forecasts were introduced in 1956.

The 1906 act governing the Bureau was repealed and replaced by the ''Meteorology Act 1955'', which brought its functions in line with the expectations of the WMO and allowed for a significant reorganisation of its structure. At this time, the Bureau came under the Department of the Interior. In 1957, partly as a response to the 1955 Hunter Valley floods, the Bureau added a hydrometeorological service. In 1964, the federal government agreed to establish one of the three World Meteorological Centres in Melbourne, as part of the WMO's World Weather Watch scheme. The Bureau also gained additional responsibilities under the ''Water Act 2007'' as the custodian of the nation's water information''.''

In October 2022, the Bureau requested media organisations and outlets to update their style guides so that the agency was to be referred to as the "Bureau of Meteorology" in the first instance and "the Bureau" in subsequent professional references, in line with other governmental agencies and the ''Meteorology Act 1955.'' The decision was reversed that week. During this period, the media cycle on this story led to death threats sent from the public to the organisation and were received by general staff, scientists, meteorologists, and other specialists within the organisation, those of which had no input or were a part of the request. Some Bureau employees at the time requested not to have their name used during live media crosses as a safety precaution. The style guide change requested was directed at professional news organisations and media outlets, but was misconstrued and the general public, who colloquially refer to the Bureau as "the BOM", believed it was referring to them.

Services and structure

The Bureau of Meteorology is the main provider of weather forecasts, warnings and observations to the Australian public.

The Bureau's head office had traditionally been in Melbourne since its creation in 1908. Since 2020, the Bureau has restructured its operations and moved to a more distributed staffing arrangement with functions spread over its capital city offices. The current Melbourne office at 700 Collins Street in Melbourne Docklands was established in 2004 and remains its largest staffed office.

Offices are located in each state and territory capital as well as offices in Cairns and Townsville. Specialist functions such as Regional Forecasting Centres (RFCs), Flood Warning Centres, the National Tidal Centre, the Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre, the Regional Specialised Meteorological Centre (Analysis), Bureau National Operations Centre (BNOC) and the Tropical Cyclone Warning Centres have been reorganised and distributed across the Bureau's offices with a major concentration of forecasting operations in Brisbane and Melbourne Docklands.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology issues tropical cyclone advices and developed the Standard Emergency Warning Signal used for warnings. The Bureau is responsible for tropical cyclone naming for storms in waters surrounding Australia. Three lists of names used to be maintained, one for each of the western, northern and eastern Australian regions. However, as of the start of the 2008–09 Tropical Cyclone Year these lists have been rolled into one main national list of tropical cyclone names.

The Bureau maintained a network of field offices across the continent but has generally de-staffed these facilities, except at capital city airports, Giles Meteorological Station, on remote overseas islands, and in Antarctica. Capital city airport offices are scheduled for automation by 2027. In 2011 there was also a network of some 300 paid co-operative observers and approximately 6,000 voluntary rainfall observers, though this number is expected to have reduced over time with increased automation. In 2022 the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) produced an audit report entitled "Bureau of Meteorology's Management of Assets in its Observing Network".

The Bureau of Meteorology has been accused of being influenced by oil and gas giants such as Santos, Chevron and Woodside to downplay the effects of climate change to "please their leaders". Sentences in the Bureau's report on the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season were censored and/or modified to remove references to climate change and long-term warming trends.

In March 2025, research from Pollster DemosAU identified the Bureau of Meteorology as Australia's most trusted national institution, ahead of the CSIRO, the Australian Electoral Commission and others.

Directors

The following people have been directors of the Bureau of Meteorology:

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High performance computing

On 30 June 2016, a new Cray XC40 supercomputer was put into service by the Bureau. It was named ''Australis'' and it was expected to be 16 times faster than the existing High Performance Computer (HPC) with a total of 1.6 petaflops of computational power, providing the operational computing capability for weather, climate, ocean and wave numerical prediction and simulation. The Bureau performs numerical weather prediction with the Unified Model software.

The Bureau decommissioned their old Oracle system in October 2016. In 2020, the Bureau decommissioned the central computing facility, which had previously been relocated to the Melbourne office in 2004, and was first commissioned in 1974. In April 2020, the Bureau received Australis II, a 4.0 petaflop Cray XC50 and CS500 system, which was expected to be operational in August 2024 after several lengthy delays.

Two years later, the Bureau bought a disaster recovery (DR) HPC system to improve the resilience of the supercomputer used to predict Australia’s weather events. Hewlett Packard Enterprise will supply the DR HPC system under a three-year contract worth , supplementing the existing Australis II.

See also

*World Meteorological Organization, co-ordination body for weather, climate and environment services
* International Cloud Experiment, which collected data on tropical cyclones in January and February 2006
* Australian region cyclone season
* Water Data Transfer Format
* Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council

References

External links

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''Federation and Meteorology'': the history of meteorology in Australia

{{Authority control

Climate of Australia
Commonwealth Government agencies of Australia
Governmental meteorological agencies in Oceania
Regional Specialized Meteorological Centres
1908 establishments in Australia