No-one
who lived through the catastrophic combination of weather systems
which flooded est. 600 kilometres of Australia’s east coast in 2022
would be in doubt that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) was
failing in its primary function.
Particularly
here in the NSW Northern Rivers region, where the erratic &
contradictory forecasting by BOM during the eight days of 23 February
to 2 March 2022 saw at least four people drown in preventable deaths.
Months
after that record-breaking flood event ABC
News reported on the findings of a NSW parliamentary inquiry:
information
from the State Emergency Service (SES) and Bureau of Meteorology
(BOM) was "incorrect and out of date", leaving the
community with "no other option but to ignore government advice
and save lives"....It urged the weather bureau to review its
rain data infrastructure and flood modelling tools.
However,
the worry began for me long before that, when in 2016 I read this:
Dr
Johnson has a Bachelor of Agricultural Science (Honours) and PhD from
the University of Queensland and a Masters in Public Administration
from the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
where he was a Rotary Foundation Scholar. He is a Fellow of the
Australian Academy of Technical Sciences and Engineering and the
Australian Institute of Company Directors.
And
realised there was no indepth formal meteorological training in his
background.
Worries
about BOM under Dr.Johnson have been bubbling to the surface in the
media since his installation as Director and this below is only the
latest.....
"I'm
told a nationwide data centre outage on Friday affected observations
~across the entire country~ Missing min and max temps, wind speeds
for Friday and Sat at every single obs. station with the exception of
the airports which are not yet auto" [Rick
Morton
@SquigglyRick,
10 June 2024]
The Saturday Paper,
June 8 – 14, 2024 | No. 503:
Inside
the Bureau of Meteorology’s forecast failings
As
the Bureau of Meteorology pulls back on its international
obligations, increasing automation and a lack of experienced staff
has made forecasts less reliable.
By
Rick Morton
Bureau
of Meteorology chief executive Dr Andrew Johnson turned up to Senate
estimates last month without his right-hand man, Peter Stone, many of
the bureau’s other executives and, apparently, his briefing notes.
Johnson,
who is also the director of meteorology, appointed to the now
$533,000 a year job in 2016 by former environment minister Josh
Frydenberg, claimed not to be able to answer basic questions about
BoM processes. At one stage, he even attempted to prevent his chief
operating officer from speaking.
“So,
you have no familiarity? Don’t you come prepared for Senate
estimates?” Liberal Senator Jonathon Duniam said after asking basic
questions alongside Greens Senator Barbara Pocock about how the BoM
handles cost overruns and contract delivery delays.
“I
am shocked at the lack of capacity to answer questions of that nature
even in a general sense. This is astounding.”
It
was less astounding to senior Bureau of Meteorology staff who have
watched a $1 billion-plus technology transformation project at the
agency, called ROBUST, slide off the rails over several years. And
less surprising still to the meteorologists at the forecaster, who
have witnessed a centralisation of the BoM’s remaining qualified
staff to a “national production” model based in Melbourne and
Brisbane while being told not to change automatic local forecasts
they know to be wrong.
“The
philosophy was ‘near enough is good enough’,” a former
meteorologist says.
“When
the director would come around spruiking the centralisation, that was
the actual quote. You know, if you’re saying it’s going to be wet
and it’s super wet, that’s not life-threatening. He wants to
focus on ‘high-impact events’ but they are not going to be a
problem because they’ve got specialised teams.
“But,
for a farmer, five millimetres [of rain] as opposed to 20 millimetres
is a massive big deal.”
The
noticeable slip in forecast quality, especially where meteorologists
have been prevented by resourcing constraints or internal policy from
correcting known errors in the automatic model outputs, was first
confirmed by The Saturday Paper and stems in part from a broader
cultural shift at the Bureau of Meteorology. According to sources,
this shift has seen a massive restructure of talent and the removal
of internal voices of dissent.
“You
can warn them about quality but they will straight up tell you black
is white and then move on, expecting you to get with the program,”
one forecaster says. “And then they wonder why the wheels are
falling off.”
Since
Johnson came to the role eight years ago, eight members of the small
executive team who report directly to him have left. The turnover in
management ranks below has been much greater.
Meanwhile,
forecasters – including those who work on floods or bushfires in
addition to the meteorologists – have increased by just five
positions. The work required of these highly qualified people,
however, has become more demanding and more complex.
Poor
planning and management practices at the weather agency have
exacerbated resource constraints. Like the weather they forecast,
these issues operate in a tightly interconnected system of feedback
loops.
Take
the now abandoned plan to move the national forecast grid to a
three-kilometre resolution. After years of effort, the project was
deemed “too hard” and shelved in late 2021, returning the nation
to a six-kilometre grid in every state and territory, including
Victoria and Tasmania, which were already successfully running at the
sharper resolution.
At
the same time, however, a new Australian Fire Danger Rating System
(AFDRS) was already in development with prototypes tested by the BoM
and the New South Wales Rural Fire Service. The royal commission into
the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires recommended it be fast-tracked.
Among
other features, this new system was designed on a three-kilometre
grid. The race to have it launched suffered as “all Graphical
Forecast Editor (GFE) development resources” were dedicated to
making the grid change happen, pushing back delivery timelines on the
new fire-warning system.
At
the other end of delivery, new delays were added. Aborting the
three-kilometre grid project resulted in the need to translate BoM’s
six-kilometre resolution data to the fire grid via additional
“workarounds” from forecasters.
Testing
of the AFDRS has now also been compromised by a six-year delay in
upgrades to the Bureau of Meteorology supercomputer, Australis II.
“The
attitude there now seems to be ‘what’s in it for us?’ despite
the fact the BoM is a big player in the Pacific region with climate
change and tropical cyclones.”
Last
month, BoM researchers led by Paul Gregory and Naomi Benger released
a report analysing the seasonal outlooks produced as part of the new
rating system.
“Currently
the outlooks cannot be verified in realtime as there are no sources
of gridded, realtime, AFDRS observations,” the paper says.
“This
lack of realtime observations also prevents the Bureau from providing
any post-event analysis using AFDRS. This service gap can be filled
by integrating the AFDRS computational modules into the Bureau’s
National Analysis System (NAS), and the realtime BARRA-2 reanalysis
system.
“Both
of these systems are currently in trial and are awaiting the
upgrading of the Bureau’s supercomputer (Australis II) for
deployment.”......
Forecasters
who spoke to The Saturday Paper, on condition of anonymity because
they feared reprisals, have attributed at least some of their deep
unhappiness at the BoM to the management culture.
One
persistent issue is the decision to launch the massive Public
Services Transformation project alongside the ROBUST technology
investment. While the former might have had some appeal from an
efficiency point of view, the parallel nature of the two vast
projects created substantial backlogs and catastrophic delays.
“To
be honest, we have never recovered from either program,” another
employee says.
“We
have just been crunched. And at the same time, the country has faced
some of its worst ever flood and fire events one after another. I
feel like the accountability has gone out the window.”
ROBUST
was in part inspired by a cybersecurity incident, and its funding,
provided by the former Coalition government, was labelled “cabinet
in confidence” and has never been officially revealed.
At
Senate estimates late last month, Andrew Johnson told the parliament
his executives were accountable to him but that he did not have a
performance agreement personally.
“My
performance agreement in a sense is the corporate plan that I table
to the minister and which is tabled to the parliament, but I
personally don’t have a performance agreement, and I’ve not had
one since I commenced in 2016,” he said.
Under
Johnson’s leadership, the Bureau of Meteorology has stopped meeting
all of its World Meteorological Organization obligations, cutting
back substantially on the frequency of upper atmosphere soundings.
Content
now removed from the BoM website states the “benefits” in data
sharing under the World Meteorological Organization are “substantial
but also impose a responsibility for Australia to also contribute to
the international system”.
As
one meteorologist told The Saturday Paper: “The attitude there now
seems to be ‘what’s in it for us?’ despite the fact the BoM is
a big player in the Pacific region with climate change and tropical
cyclones.”
Domestically,
quality suffers in subtle but important ways. Overnight shifts on the
national production desk can shrink to four people who are
responsible for an entire country’s forecasting. Almost all of this
is model output, but changes still need to be made and there are only
so many available to perform the work.
Now
even the capital city airports – a fiercely protected domain by
aviation forecasters at the BoM – are subject to automation with a
$3.3 million, one-year contract issued by the weather agency in the
middle of May.
Last
weekend, in Perth, the BoM’s Saturday night forecasts were accurate
but the Sunday forecast predicted “armageddon” – despite the
fact the weather had all but cleared.
“And
the issue that comes out early in the morning, that’s the four
o’clock issue, it’s done from Melbourne,” a meteorologist says.
“The forecasters come in at 6am and then have to look at what mess
they’d been left with, basically, and try and make sense of it.”
Early
Sunday morning, the BoM was still predicting 25 to 50 millimetres of
rain in Perth, with thunderstorms that were possibly severe.
“It
had all gone overnight Saturday and into Sunday morning,” the
forecaster says.
“So
by eight o’clock Sunday, you were left with a few residual showers
before the forecast got changed at nine o’clock, and reflected what
it should have been. They had the rainfall totals down to about seven
millimetres, but the app continued to show 20 to 50 millimetres.”
Such
an approach to forecasting nationally is not without consequences.
Farmers in the Western Australian wheat belt were furious. Organisers
of a WA Day celebration event in Burswood cancelled the festival in
advance, based on forecasts that showed “even heavier rainfall”
throughout the long weekend.....
The
Bureau of Meteorology said in a statement that Peter Stone, who
earlier this year was found by a Federal Circuit Court judge to have
engaged in a deliberate attempt to mislead the court regarding a BoM
workplace case, was sick during the week of Senate estimates.
This
article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday
Paper on June 8, 2024 as "Inside the BoM’s forecast failings".
Read the full article at:
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/environment/2024/06/08/inside-the-boms-failings-they-will-straight-tell-you-black-white
