Halls Creek weather radar to be upgraded

15/06/2022

Issued: Wednesday, 15 June 2022

The Halls Creek weather radar will undergo a significant upgrade to provide local community and industry with more reliable and up-to-date weather information as part of the Bureau of Meteorology's comprehensive observation network upgrade program.

The upgrades will improve wind tracking, rainfall image quality and severe storm predictions.

From 29 June 2022 the Halls Creek radar will be offline for six weeks. The Bureau will upgrade the radar, which includes replacing the radar transceiver equipment. At the same time, a new radar shelter will be installed to house new equipment at the current site.

During the outage, there will be no impact to the Bureau's forecasts and warnings, which are informed by observations from a range of assets including satellites, upper atmosphere monitoring and automatic weather stations.

Up-to-date forecasts and warnings will continue to be published on the Bureau's website and on the BOM Weather app.

During the outage period, those seeking situational awareness of rain can use a range of alternative sources.

• The Wyndham radar provides some overlapping coverage for the region and can be accessed on the Bureau's website and BOM Weather app.
• The Bureau's MetEye service provides publicly accessible images showing temperature, rain and wind information.
• The community can also access satellite images from the Himawari-8 satellite. These images are also available from the Bureau's website and show cloud cover and lightning strikes.

The Halls Creek radar upgrade is one part of a comprehensive weather observation network of more than 11,000 assets including satellites, upper atmosphere monitoring, automatic weather stations, ocean buoys and flood warning networks.

ENDS