Darwin's Berrimah weather radar upgrade to improve severe storm predictions

27/07/2022

The Berrimah weather radar, the main radar for Darwin, is set to undergo a significant upgrade to provide the local community and industry with more reliable and up-to-date weather information. To make the changes, the radar will be offline for up to 8 weeks.

On Thursday 21 July 2022, the Bureau of Meteorology commenced installation of a new digital receiver and control system for the radar.

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

While the Berrimah radar is offline, the Bureau will make images from the Darwin Airport radar, usually reserved for aviation customers, available on its website and BOM weather app.

The Berrimah radar outage will have no impact on the Bureau's forecasting or warning services.

During this period, up-to-date weather information will be available via a range of sources:

• 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 for Bureau's website and show cloud cover and lightning strikes.
• Images from the Darwin Airport and the Katherine weather radars can be viewed on the Bureau's website and the BOM Weather app.

The Berrimah and Darwin Airport weather radars are 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