AWN CHANGES UPDATE: 3 JULY 2026

NOTE: THERE ARE NO CHANGES TO OCF PAGES
PLANNED AT THIS TIME

A number of changes will be made to these sections of AWN in the next few weeks. A change in the way data is received means that some data will cease and some will change in its availability.

Reason for the changes

For most of AWN's 30-year existence, I have used advertising to help pay the Bureau of Meteorology subscription charges of several thousand dollars a year for the data shown on the site as well as the substantial costs of maintaining a very large website. That has worked well until recently, with income slightly exceeding expenses allowing money to be put aside for occasional computer renewal.

Unfortunately, although user numbers remain the same, the increasing use of ad-blocking software by users in the past two to three years means that income from advertising no longer pays for site maintenance much less BoM data subscriptions which I have subsidised myself. This cannot continue. The result is that I must rely on freely available data from other feeds if the data-intensive DWS and DCD sections of the site are to continue.

The impact on you

The complex changes in switching to new data streams will take a while to implement, and there is a degree of trial and error involved as well. I intend that these two sections of Australian Weather News, the DWS and DCD, will continue to be available, but expect a period while new systems are cut in and experiments are tried when unexpected consequences may go public in real time. I hope this will last less than a month. The Provisional records set or equalled today section is suspended while data streams are switched over and other site changes made.

Here is a summary of changes that I know will occur due to the loss of subscription data.

Changes affecting both the DWS and DCD pages

• Minimum and maximum temperatures will continue to be available to one decimal place for Automatic Weather Stations, but only to the nearest whole degree for weather stations run by human observers. Because grass minimum temperatures are only taken at manned sites, they will also only be reported to the nearest whole degree.
• AWS minima and maxima will be reported for non-standard periods: minima for the 24 hours to 10am EST and maxima for the 24 hours to 10pm EST. On most days these will be no different to the standard 9am to 9am periods, but there will be occasions when they differ significantly.
  
  An advantage is that the data becomes available earlier each day, especially maxima which become available late evening rather than in the afternoon of the next day. I can also begin checking the data for errors sooner each day.
• Manned site minima, grass minima and maxima will continue to use the 9am Bureau standard cycle with minima and grass minima for the 24 hours TO 9am and maxima for the 24 hours FROM 9am. This data will be available soon after the observations are made at 9am in each time zone.
• Rainfall will continue to be available for each 24-hour period to 9am local time for about 2000 sites routinely reporting daily rainfall in real time. Observations to the nearest whole millimetre will become available as soon as they are received from AWS and manual weather stations. A full rain list to the nearest 0.2mm including all daily-reporting rain-only BoM stations will be processed soon after 2pm daily and updated with additional data the next morning.
  
  The downside is that the "postal rainfall readings" at an additional ~4000 rainfall stations will no longer be available. At these stations, the observers post a form containing the month's observations to the BoM after the end of each month and BoM staff enter them into the climate database. You may have noticed how these add many stations in each district in the Daily Climatic Data archives when they are updated monthly for the past 6 months.

Daily Weather Summary

• Provisional TEMPERATURE records set or equalled today: This section of the Daily Weather Summary will be the hardest to maintain because of the mix of non-standard hours and whole and decimal degrees in the temperature sections.
  
• Provisional RAINFALL records set or equalled today: As all rainfall is reported to the nearest 0.2mm to 9am daily, this section doesn't have the problems of temperatures so should continue much as before.
• Daily sunshine, evaporation and wind run data: These readings will be discontinued as they are only available on subscription.
• Daily maximum wind gusts: The subscription data carrying details of maximum wind gusts at all Automatic Weather Stations will be discontinued. However, I also receive some maximum wind gusts through the aviation weather data feed, and the highest of these will continue to be available and updated through each day in the High AWS wind reports section at the bottom of the Daily Weather Summary. This is a real-time feed and is not guaranteed to be either complete or accurate, so is unsuitable for use in generating records.
• Manual checking of daily records for correctness and accuracy: is an essential part of this section, and I will be considering how sustainable this will be given the variations in temperature reporting standards that will exist. Different hours of measurement and different levels of reporting precision will make this the most challenging problem to solve, though I have a solution in mind. The question and experiment will be how long it takes to do more complex checking manually each day.