Using AWN
AWN is a HUGE site (315,440 files as at 27/11/12) but finding your way around is easy if you follow this short guide.
- Use the menu and sub-menus at the top of each screen to go to AWN's main sections.
- Some pages that don't
have the menu bar at the top open in a new window.
- The main weather pages have a Links to other sites box that leads you to links to hundreds of relevant sites outside AWN.
- The site is best viewed at a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels or greater.
Finding what you want
- Forecasts: Weather warnings and forecasts for all Australia, Bureau 7-day OCF guidance forecasts for up to a week for over 600 locations, and computer model forecasts of rain and more.
- Current: The weather today and right now. Radar, lightning, satellite images, detailed rainfall maps, and weather readings from all Australian stations. AWN also presents a huge range of synoptic charts covering the whole world but with particular emphasis on Australia.
- Daily Weather Summaries: Charts, statistics and news stories give the most detailed national weather coverage available in one place for every day back to 1996. Today's is here.
- Recent & Climate: Rainfall, temperature and more for every Australian station going back to the beginning of weather records. Long-term averages, charts, climate change, El Nino.
- Severe: Current and past cyclones, floods, droughts, thunderstorms, hail, tornadoes, snowstorms, bushfires, gales and high seas.
- Know-how: How the weather works; observing, analysing and forecasting the weather as well as tech stuff for those keen to expand their weather knowledge.
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Site news
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- 27 March 2013 - 10 Minute reports available for Casey Base, Antarctica. I've added the 10-minute observations from Australia's Casey Base - click the Antarctica link in the grey menu bar at Current > 10 Min Obs. These make for interesting reading during wild weather. Click on the station name "CASEY" to get a one-week archive of data.
- 26 March 2013 - Updates to radar pages. AWN's radar pages for Northern Territory and Western Australia have been updated to show the new Warruwi radar in NT, the recommissioned Tennant Creek radar in NT and the decommissioned Eucla radar in WA. Changes have also been made to the mobile radar pages for NT and WA.
- 26 March 2013 - Concern at loss of Eucla radar. ABC News reported on Friday that there was ongoing concern among residents in the Eucla area of far southeastern WA at the loss of their radar facility last December. It came about because a significant reduction in the Bureau's upper air observation program saw the Eucla radar's role as a windfinder radar eliminated.
The Eucla decommissioning is the first instance in Australia of an area losing its radar coverage.
- Both the Eucla and Tennant Creek NT radars were to be decommissioned due to budgetary constraints, though the Tennant Creek radar has since been recommissioned following agitation from locals. Pressure is also being applied to government by the Orana Regional Organisation of Councils to plug a large radar gap in the major agricultural and pastoral area of central western NSW.
- 26 March 2013 - Updates to main current weather page. You can now click on the lightning and satellite image, provided by the World Wide Lightning Location Network, for a 24-hour animation. The link to the WWLLN homepage has been updated.
- 27 November 2012 - Permafrost, or continuously frozen ground, covers 24% of the land surface of the Northern Hemisphere storing around 1700 billion tonnes of ancient forests and other organic material. This is around four times more than all the carbon emitted by human activity in modern times and twice as much as is present in the atmosphere now. A United Nations report just released, Policy Implications of Warming Permafrost, raises concerns that permafrost melt is far more advanced than previously accounted for with stark implications for global efforts to slow or reverse the march of global warming. "Permafrost emissions could ultimately account for up to 39% of total emissions," said the report's lead author, Kevin Schaefer, of the University of Colorado. The report and situation is summarised in this article and video in today's Sydney Morning Herald, while the report itself is here.
- 12 November 2012 -
The new Weather Watch radar at Mount Isa, QLD, was commissioned today and has been added to AWN's North QLD page and the AWN mobile QLD page.
It provides coverage of much of NW QLD with the added advantages of showing
Doppler wind information and rainfall accumulations.
It will be a boon to forecasters and the community in monitoring wet season weather systems. The radar is located on a 22m tower on top of Telstra Hill, 8km east of Mt Isa city, at 501m above sea level.
It was installed as part of the Bureau's Strategic Radar Enhancement Project (SREP), a $48m grant over 7 years received by the Bureau from the Federal Government to instal four radars and improve weather radar science. This is the third of four new radars to be commissioned. Wollongong (Appin) was commissioned in
May 2011 and Hobart (Mt Koonya) April 2012.
The final radar, located at Warruwi (South Goulburn Island) and to be named the Arafura Radar is planned for next year.
- 1 November 2012 - The Bureau of Meteorology's Next Generation Forecast and Warning System has now spread to Western Australia bringing some considerable improvements in terms of forecast availability and duration. 63 locations across the state will now get 7-day forecasts presented as a combination of graphics and text. District forecasts and the Perth metropolitan forecast contain more detail and there are a greater number of more detailed coastal waters forecasts. The new forecasts are issued twice daily unless changes are required - the morning issue is between 4 and 5am with an afternoon issue between 4 and 4.30pm. The NexGen System is nearing completion with only Queensland and the Northern Territory remaining to be converted, while WA is still to receive a state graphical Forecast Explorer.
- 1 November 2012 - Australian Weather News's Forecast Matrix has been updated and rationalised. It gives links to all the new forecasting services in a format that allows quick access to all Bureau forecasts for anywhere in Australia.
- 16 September 2012 - The global extreme high temperature record long regarded as the highest ever recorded on the surface of the planet - 58ºC (136.4 ºF) at El Azizia, Libya on 13 September 1922 - has been invalidated by an expert panel of the World Meteorological Organisation. The press release announcing the reasons for this is here. The official highest global temperature on record now stands at 56.7°C (134°F), measured on 10 July 1913 at Greenland Ranch in Death Valley, California, USA. A full regularly updated list of global, hemispheric and continental extremes of temperature, rainfall, wind, pressure, hailstone weight and aridity, as well as records for tornadoes, tropical cyclones and ocean waves is kept here. Click any record for more information about it. For detailed Australian records, including those for each state and territory, go here.
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