Issued Thursday 25 May 2023
From 29 May 2023 subject to any unforeseen delays, the Bureau of Meteorology will commence works to replace the Gove weather radar with dual-polarised Doppler radar technology.
During the radar upgrade the Gove radar will be offline for approximately 2 months.
Located at the Gove Airport, the upgraded radar will provide the local community and industry with more reliable and up-to-date weather information.
The Bureau’s Senior Officer for the Northern Territory Jude Scott explained that the radar needs to go offline for technicians to install the new Doppler radar. Once completed it will serve the community, emergency services and local industry with its real-time observation technology.
“We are working with our customers to minimise disruption and we appreciate the community’s patience as we install the new dual-polarised Doppler technology,’ Ms Scott said.
“The Gove weather radar upgrade is part of a number of improvements we’re making to Bureau infrastructure in the Top End.
“In the last year we have also upgraded the Darwin Airport, Berrimah and Warruwi weather radars.”
The Bureau’s MetEye service provides publicly accessible images showing temperature, rain and wind information. The community can also access satellite images from the Himawari-8 satellite on the Bureau’s website, showing cloud cover and lightning strikes. 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.
During the planned outage period, up-to-date forecasts and warnings will continue to be published on the Bureau’s website and the BOM Weather app.
This project is part of the Bureau’s ongoing work to enhance and improve the Australian radar and observation network. We are delivering 8 new radars, plus upgrades to 46 radars, almost 700 automatic weather stations and 384 flood warning network assets across the country.
