Images from the new Townsville weather radar are now live on the Bureau of Meteorology’s and the BOM Weather app.
The new dual-polarised Doppler radar will benefit communities, emergency services and local industry across Townsville, Bowen, Charters Towers, Palm Island and surrounding areas. It will enable users to observe rainfall and wind conditions in real time across large areas, including approaching tropical cyclones.
The new radar will have some overlapping coverage with the Bowen and Greenvale radars, providing some back-up in the event of a radar outage.
The new radar will provide higher quality images and better visibility of weather systems, especially during intense rain and storms. It will also be easier to distinguish rain and hail.
Bureau of Meteorology Chief Customer Officer Dr Peter Stone said that the Bureau has completed the new radar project ahead of the upcoming severe weather and cyclone season.
“Scheduling radar upgrades is challenging because we need to turn the old radar off while the new one is installed. We try to do this outside of the severe weather season, so that the interruption has the least impact on our customers and the community,” Dr Stone said.
“Townsville is one of several Queensland radar upgrades we have completed in the past 12 months.”
Information from weather radars is one of the most popular Bureau services. Radars are an important part of our observation network, which also includes satellites, upper atmosphere observations, automatic weather stations, ocean buoys and river gauges.
Collectively, these help to provide data that the Bureau uses to create:
- 7-day weather forecasts
- rainfall and flood warnings
- estimates of accumulated rainfall and stored soil moisture
- short-term forecasts of rainfall and severe weather, including hail and wind changes.
While the old radar is being dismantled, a section of the new radar’s beam will be blanked out to the south-east. This will prevent radio signals from the new radar being reflected back from the old radar tower and causing damage to the new radar. Full radar coverage will be provided as soon as possible.
The Townsville radar upgrade is part of the Bureau’s ongoing work to enhance and improve the Australian radar and observation network.
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