Brisbane’s Marburg weather radar closed until the end of the year

The Bureau of Meteorology will shut down one of its most popular weather radars for six months. Here’s what you should do.

The Marburg weather radar station located at The Bluff.

The Bureau of Meteorology has announced the Brisbane (Marburg) weather radar will be down for about six months while it is replaced with new technology.

The Marburg radar which acts as a secondary weather radar for Brisbane (Mt Stapylton) is going to be replaced with dual-polarised Doppler radar technology – used to observe real-time rainfall and wind conditions across large areas.

The work will begin on April 26 at the existing radar site and it is expected to be completed in late 2023.

The technology being implemented is also used by Mt Stapylton and will improve Marburg’s image quality making it a more reliable secondary weather radar.

The existing Mt Stapylton weather radar will continue to provide coverage and a temporary radar at Brisbane Airport will serve as an additional weather radar for the region.

The Bureau‘s chief customer officer Dr Peter Stone said the radar needs to go offline for technicians to complete the work of installing the new Doppler radar.

Once completed it will serve the community, emergency services and local industry with its real-time observation technology.

“The Marburg radar is one part of a comprehensive weather observation network of more than 11,000 assets including satellites, upper atmosphere monitoring, automatic weather stations, ocean buoys and flood warning networks,” Dr Stone said.

The Bureau has advised anyone searching for more weather resources can use the existing Brisbane (Mt Stapylton) radar and the temporary radar at Brisbane Airport.

People can also use the Bureau’s MetEve service for temperature, rain and wind information as well as satellite images from the Himawari-8 satellite which shows cloud cover and lightning strikes.

There will not be an impact on the Bureau’s forecasts and warnings.