Mt Stapylton Radar offline for mid-life refurbishment

18/04/2018

Brisbane's Mt Stapylton Radar will be offline from today (18 April) for approximately two weeks while we complete a mid-life refurbishment that will extend the radar's operational life by a further 10 years. We anticipate the radar will be back online by Friday 27 April.

This outage has been planned well in advance; following the peak of severe weather and storm season and the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.

While employing advanced technology, Mount Stapylton is not a new radar. As you would service your car, we also need to service our radar network regularly, replacing parts that wear out over time. This refurbishment will replace components such as the klystron (which converts electrical to microwave energy), the power supply, motor and gear assemblies and control circuitry.

These works are unrelated to an unplanned outage of Mt Stapylton which occurred during February to resolve an intermittent issue of incomplete radar scans. Following extensive diagnostic tests, we were able to successfully resolve this issue and the radar has performed without fault since its return to service in March.

Southeast Queensland is fortunate to have overlapping radar coverage from nearby Marburg, and also Gympie to the north and Grafton further south. While of lower resolution, Marburg Radar when used in conjunction with nearby radars, high-resolution satellite imagery and real-time lightning data, enables the Bureau to provide a reliable warning service while Mt Stapylton is offline.

Late last year Mt Stapylton was one of four Doppler radars nationally to benefit from the addition of dual-polarisation technology, similar to that trialled in the CP2 (cloud physics) research radar previously located at Redbank Plains. Dual-polarisation sends out vertically polarised pulses in addition to the standard horizontally polarised pulses, providing our forecasters with a more detailed picture inside of weather systems.