Bureau of Meteorology

History

The Bureau of Meteorology was established on 1 January 1908 following the passage of the Meteorology Act 1906. Prior to Federation in 1901, each colony had had its own meteorological service, with all but two colonies also having a subsection devoted to astronomy. In August 1905, federal home affairs minister Littleton Groom surveyed state governments for their willingness to cede control, finding South Australia and Victoria unwilling. However, at a ministerial conference in April 1906, the state governments agreed to transfer responsibility for meteorology and astronomy to the federal government. Groom rejected a takeover of astronomy due to its connection to universities, which relied on state legislation for their authority.

Henry Ambrose Hunt was appointed as the first Commonwealth Meteorologist in November 1906. Initially, the Bureau had few staff and issued a single daily forecast for each state, transmitted by Morse code to country areas. Radio forecasts were introduced in 1924. The Bureau received additional funding from the late 1930s, in the lead-up to World War II, and it was incorporated into the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) from 1941 until after the conclusion of the war. It became an inaugural member of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1950. Televised weather forecasts were introduced in 1956.

The 1906 act governing the Bureau was repealed and replaced by the Meteorology Act 1955, which brought its functions in line with the expectations of the WMO and allowed for a significant reorganisation of its structure. At this time, the Bureau came under the Department of the Interior. In 1957, partly as a response to the 1955 Hunter Valley floods, the Bureau added a hydrometeorological service. In 1964, the federal government agreed to establish one of the three World Meteorological Centres in Melbourne, as part of the WMO's World Weather Watch scheme. The BOM also gained additional responsibilities under the Water Act 2007 as the custodian of the nation's water information.

In October 2022, the BOM requested media organisations and outlets to update their style guides so that the agency was to be referred to as the "Bureau of Meteorology" in the first instance and "the Bureau" in subsequent professional references, in line with other governmental agencies and the Meteorology Act 1955. The decision was reversed that week. During this period, the media cycle on this story led to death threats sent from the public to the organisation and were received by general staff, scientists, meteorologists, and other specialists within the organisation, those of which had no input or were a part of the request. Some BOM employees at the time requested not to have their name used during live media crosses as a safety precaution. The style guide change was unclear as to whether the BOM also wanted the public to stop calling them the "BOM".

On 22 October 2025, the BOM released an updated website for the first time in 12 years with a new design and functionality, including https; however, it caused a public backlash mainly due to changes in navigation and the radar display. The change was described by some as "confusing", "clunky" and "really bad." 7News weather presenter Tony Auden said of the changes to the radar: "While it's never been properly defined, we’ve always had a rule of thumb that black on the radar means hail, and it's worked pretty well over the years...The new BOM radar view has essentially clipped the top end of the radar scale at orange, so we can't see any detail in the biggest storms ... This left a lot of people in the dark about the threat to their homes during the height of the severe weather yesterday.”

Queensland Premier David Crisafulli said "the changes to the website don't make sense", while federal Nationals leader David Littleproud said people in his rural Queensland electorate “were not given the information they needed after the recent rain event”. On 29 October, the federal Environment Minister Murray Watt and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen said the bureau had lost its social licence because of the website upgrade and demanded urgent changes. Watt wrote in a statement: "It’s clear that the new BOM website is not meeting many users' expectations, with a significant range of feedback provided to the Bureau in recent days ... I made clear my expectations that the BoM needed to consider this feedback and, where appropriate, adjust the website's settings as soon as possible." Also on 29 October, the BOM apologised for the changes and said "adjustments" will be made. The re-design by Deloitte and the digital infrastructure by Accenture cost a total of $96.5 million, against an original budget of $31 million.

Services and structure

The Bureau of Meteorology is the main provider of weather forecasts, warnings and observations to the Australian public.

The Bureau's head office had traditionally been in Melbourne since its creation in 1908. Since 2020, the Bureau has restructured its operations and moved to a more distributed staffing arrangement with functions spread over its capital city offices. The current Melbourne office at 700 Collins Street in Melbourne Docklands was established in 2004 and remains its largest staffed office.

Offices are located in each state and territory capital as well as offices in Cairns and Townsville. Specialist functions such as Regional Forecasting Centres (RFCs), Flood Warning Centres, the National Tidal Centre, the Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre, the Regional Specialised Meteorological Centre (Analysis), Bureau National Operations Centre (BNOC) and the Tropical Cyclone Warning Centres have been reorganised and distributed across the Bureau's offices with a major concentration of forecasting operations in Brisbane and Melbourne Docklands. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology issues tropical cyclone advices and developed the Standard Emergency Warning Signal used for warnings. The Bureau is responsible for tropical cyclone naming for storms in waters surrounding Australia. Three lists of names used to be maintained, one for each of the western, northern and eastern Australian regions. However, as of the start of the 2008–09 Tropical Cyclone Year these lists have been rolled into one main national list of tropical cyclone names.

The Bureau maintained a network of field offices across the continent but has generally de-staffed these facilities, except at capital city airports, Giles Meteorological Station, on remote overseas islands, and in Antarctica. Capital city airport offices are scheduled for automation by 2027. In 2011 there was also a network of some 300 paid co-operative observers and approximately 6,000 voluntary rainfall observers, though this number is expected to have reduced over time with increased automation. In 2022 the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) produced an audit report entitled "Bureau of Meteorology's Management of Assets in its Observing Network".

The Bureau of Meteorology has been accused of being influenced by oil and gas giants such as Santos, Chevron and Woodside to downplay the effects of climate change to "please their leaders". Sentences in the Bureau's report on the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season were censored and/or modified to remove references to climate change and long-term warming trends. Additionally, staff time and supercomputer modelling resources were regularly directed from core services to supporting commercial offshore oil and gas ventures outside of appropriate commercial fee-for-service arrangements at below-cost, given the significant expense of running the resources.

In March 2025, research from Pollster DemosAU identified the Bureau of Meteorology as Australia's most trusted national institution, ahead of the CSIRO, the Australian Electoral Commission and others.

Directors

The following people have been directors of the Bureau of Meteorology:

High performance computing

On 30 June 2016, a Cray XC40 supercomputer was put into service by the Bureau. It was named Australis and it was expected to be 16 times faster than the existing High Performance Computer (HPC) with a total of 1.6 petaflops of computational power, providing the operational computing capability for weather, climate, ocean and wave numerical prediction and simulation. The Bureau performs numerical weather prediction with the Unified Model software.

The Bureau decommissioned its Oracle system in October 2016. In 2020, the Bureau decommissioned the central computing facility, which had previously been relocated to the Melbourne office in 2004, and was first commissioned in 1974. In April 2020, the Bureau received Australis II, a 4.0 petaflop Cray XC50 and CS500 system, which was expected to be operational in August 2024 after several lengthy delays.

Two years later, the Bureau bought a disaster recovery (DR) HPC system to improve the resilience of the supercomputer used to predict Australia’s weather events. Hewlett Packard Enterprise will supply the DR HPC system under a three-year contract worth , supplementing the existing Australis II.

References

References

1. (24 September 2025). "Annual Report 2024–25". Bureau of Meteorology.
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9. (2001). "The Meteorology Act 1955". Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre.
10. (2001). "World Meteorological Centre, Melbourne". Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre.
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13. (20 October 2022). "'The Bureau of Management': Former staff say cultural issues behind Bureau of Meteorology's 'nonsense' rebrand". ABC News.
14. (2022-10-28). "BOM boss apologises for confusion surrounding its 'brand refresh'". ABC News.
15. "The BoM has finally tamed SSL".
16. Turton, Steve. (29 October 2025). "Stormy weather: here's what went wrong with the Bureau of Meteorology's website redesign". [[The Conversation (website).
17. Brischetto, Patrick. (2025-10-29). "Bureau of Meteorology make vow over website after public backlash".
18. Dumas, Daisy. (2025-10-23). "'Your new website sucks': Bureau of Meteorology redesign is lightning rod for heated criticism". The Guardian.
19. (2025-10-27). "'Glaring issue': Calls for new weather website to be re-examined after storms".
20. Butler, Josh. (2025-10-29). "Bureau of Meteorology apologises for new website and promises changes after 'flawed' update". The Guardian.
21. Lazzaro, Kellie. (29 October 2025). "Bureau of Meteorology ordered to fix new website after torrent of complaints". [[ABC News (Australia).
22. Foley, Mike. (2025-10-29). "Ministers haul in BOM chief for grilling over $4.1m website fiasco".
23. (23 November 2025). "Work continues to deliver website improvements". Bureau of Meteorology.
24. Morton, Rick. (2025-11-29). "Inside BoM's $96m fiasco". [[Schwartz Media]].
25. "Bureau of Meteorology Head Office 700 Collins Street". Bureau of Meteorology.
26. [http://www.bom.gov.au/weather/cyclone/about/warnings/WarningsInformation_TC_Advice.shtml Tropical Cyclone Advices] {{Webarchive. link. (11 March 2009 , Bureau of Meteorology, 2009)
27. "Tropical Cyclone Names". Bureau of Meteorology.
28. (2017-06-01). "BOM's last outback Queensland weather bureau closes". ABC News.
29. (2023-07-08). "Just how isolated this weather station is takes some explaining. But that's not what makes it unique". ABC News.
30. "Automation of Aerodrome Observations".
31. "A short history of the Bureau of Meteorology - Social Media Blog - Bureau of Meteorology".
32. (29 April 2025). "Bureau of Meteorology's Management of Assets in its Observing Network, Auditor-General Report No.21 of 2024-25".
33. (6 December 2020). "Undue Influence: oil and gas giants infiltrate Australia's Bureau of Meteorology".
34. "Use of ensembles in the energy and resource sector forecasts".
35. "Exclusive: BoM staff redirected to work for fossil fuel companies". [[The Saturday Paper]].
36. "BOM buys $49m disaster recovery HPC system from HPE". www.itnews.com.au.
37. (2025-03-12). "Australia's Most Trusted Institutions: BoM, CSIRO, AEC".
38. (20 February 2012). "Government thanks outgoing Bureau of Meteorology director, Dr Greg Ayers". [[Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities]].
39. (30 April 2016). "'Perilous': Bureau of Meteorology boss Rob Vertessy exits with climate warning". The Sydney Morning Herald.
40. (5 September 2016). "Dr Andrew Johnson appointed as Director of Meteorology". Bureau of Meteorology.
41. "BOM buys $49m disaster recovery HPC system from HPE".
42. (8 June 2024). "Inside the Bureau of Meteorology's forecast failings".
43. "Bureau of Meteorology shuts oldest data centre after 46 years".