Townsville weather radar upgrades delayed again
Upgrades to the Townsville weather radar have again been delayed after BOM were caught off-guard by inclement weather conditions.
Townsville
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The Bureau of Meteorology has once again delayed plans to shut down their Townsville based weather radar after a severe weather warning was issued.
Plans to replace the radar at Hervey Range were delayed as Cyclone Jasper bore down on North Queensland in December but the Bureau of Meteorology said on Sunday that it would be switched off from 5am to 7.30pm from Monday to Friday until “March to May, 2024”.
However, later in the day, the Bureau backflipped, declaring that the radar would remain up and running due to the encroaching weather.
“Due to severe weather, the Townsville radar outage has been postponed.”
An exact date has not been rescheduled, but BOM said the radar would be replaced by new “modern and reliable dual-polarised Doppler radar technology” to be constructed 50 metres from the existing site by mid-2024.
“Severe weather can happen at any time of the year and radar replacements and upgrades present complex scheduling challenges for the Bureau,” A spokesman for the organisation said.
“There are several projects at different stages of upgrade across the country, while we endeavour to avoid construction during severe weather season some projects experience delays.”
The spokesman said the new radar would comprise a radar tower, radome and equipment shelter.
“In the event of severe weather, construction will stop and the old radar will be temporarily returned to service.”
BOM said radars emitted non-ionising radiation when in operation, “so to ensure the safety of workers the old radar needs to be switched off while the new radar is installed”.
“Under normal operating conditions, weather radars pose no hazard to the general public.”
It said that during the outage period, alternative sources of rainfall information were available, including the Greenvale and Bowen radars that provided some overlapping coverage for the region.
Both could be accessed on the Bureau’s website and BOM Weather app.
“The Bureau’s MetEye service provides publicly accessible images showing temperature, rain and wind information,” a spokesman said.
“The community can also access satellite images from the Himawari-9 satellite.
“These images are available from the Bureau’s website and show cloud cover and lightning strikes.”
BOM said hourly rainfall forecasts and observations would continue to be available on the BOM Weather app.
“There will be no impact to the Bureau’s forecasts and warnings, which are informed by observations from a range of assets including satellites, upper atmosphere monitoring and automatic weather stations,” it said.
“Up-to-date forecasts, observations and warnings will continue to be published on the Bureau’s website bom.gov.au and on the BOM Weather app.”
The upgraded radar 25 kilometres west-south-west of Townsville will provide more reliable and up-to-date weather information.
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