Wow a rare event to report – BoM sends me a sensible email communication – chalk that one up.
Around 19Jun23 I noticed a mystery Island was showing SE of Tas on BoM www rainfall maps where by colour coded dots they portray rain gauge readings over the last 48 hrs.
www.bom.gov.au/australia/flood/index.shtml
I Tweeted this on the 19th –
Australian Bureau of Meteorology discovers a new Tasmanian Island – YeeHa!! pic.twitter.com/3mRqdJOT4q
— Warwick Hughes (@IPCC_Errs) June 19, 2023
thinking this would find its way to BoM and they would quickly fix their html error.
I have been away from Twitter for several years and restarted after Musk bought in.
I know nothing about the finer points of tweeting.
If any reader knows of some useful www “tweeting for dummies” please pass on.
When after a few days the “island was still showing” on 22 June I emailed Minister Plibersek who has BoM under her wing.
My email got the usual “machine acknowledgement” and I noticed Mystery Island disappeared on 28Jun, I tweeted this.
Australian Fed Gov BoM Bureau of Meteorology takes two months to correct an html glitch causing a fake island with rain gauge to show SE of Tasmania.
~60 risings and settings of the sun and no staffer noticed the elementary error in Aussie geography. t.co/hDUurGnAR3 pic.twitter.com/mtWMpreAxi— Warwick Hughes (@IPCC_Errs) June 28, 2023
Mystery Island reappeared on 29th and vanished again on 30th.
Then yesterday a reply came in from BoM – click for jpg copy.
warwickhughes.com/agri16/BoM-reply-mystery-Tas-island-12jul23.jpg
I have difficulty remembering a more sensible and to the point reply from BoM and I am wondering if Minister Plibersek possesses some magical powers she can assert over BoM.
Well done Warwick. At least they got the rainfall on the Sunshine coast correct although way out in the forecast. We had 25mm of rain over night and more today -I will check in the morning tomorrow
I should have added that the forecast one week out was 1mm at 60% chance. One day out the forecast was still at 1mm. One month out the general forecast was drier than normal.
On 14th July we had 14.9mm to make the total to date for the month 84.5 mm with the 130 year average for all July being 81.6mm. So BOM has no idea about predicting rainfall.
I think Dr.Jennifer Marohasy (jennifermarohasy.com/jenns-blog/) with Prof John Abbot has proven a better predicting tool. “Marohasy, J. and Abbot, J. 2015. Assessing the quality of eight different maximum temperature time series as inputs when using artificial neural networks to forecast monthly rainfall at Cape Otway, Australia, Atmospheric Research, Volume 166, Pages 141-149. doi: 10.1016/j.atmosres.2015.06.025.”
Hi Wazz
I do wonder if the wrong location info will linger on in some parts of their system or other government systems while being fixed where you noticed it.
I once had a similar reply from them when i pointed out an error with the location of the main long Brisbane regional office record. They have since changed the location in the climate data on line site info but the old location lingers in the SILO system they setup with the QLD gov’t Longpaddock people.
Oh and here is some info about the new rainfall mapping.
www.bom.gov.au/research/publications/researchreports/BRR-041.pdf