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Night Watch At The Weather Bureau
The Age
Tuesday January 21, 1992
Whether it is night or day, the weather does not go away. In the second of a six-part series on Melbourne at night, JEFF JENKINS visits the weather bureau at 1am.
The public is demanding more and better forecasts from the weather bureau. Concreters, housewives, fishermen, cricket fans and the airlines are relying on them.
For the 18 meteorologists (15 men and three women) at the bureau in Lonsdale Street, this means longer hours. Three forecasters work from 7pm to 7am. You go to bed with your outfit for the next day all worked out, but these people may force you to revise your plans when you wake up.
But relax. They claim that the 24-hour attention and the bureau's high-tech equipment means they are getting it right more often. ``There's no doubt about it," said Michael Halfpenny, a forecaster who has been with the bureau for 14 years. ``If you look back 20 years, it's incomparable. We are just so much better." But the weather people still get abused. ``We do get a number of abusive calls, mostly from concreters who want us to make the decisions for them. They call and say: `Should I pour or not?' We tell them we can't answer that, we can only tell them what the forecast is." Aside from concreters, who do not want to pour if it pours, the bureau gets plenty of other calls. In fact, Melbourne is the nation's most-called bureau.
Most of the calls at night come from fishermen. But the forecasters also take calls from housewives wondering whether they will be able to hang clothes out, and even cricket fans.
On the night `The Age' visited, the bureau was taking calls from India: ``I was wondering whether you could tell me what the forecast was for the MCG ... will we get a full day's play in?" The advice of forecaster Dean Stewart is not to take the forecast on the nightly news as gospel. ``Things develop overnight. Cold fronts can slow down and speed up, and they can develop as they move," he said.
``We get new charts (from observers across the nation and satellites) throughout the night. If those charts are saying something dramatically different, we have got to take a good look at it." Mr Stewart said he would change the forecast top temperature, if needs be, when he frames the day's outlook at 5am (the boating forecast is done at 4.15am).
So how does the forecaster come up with a top temperature? ``Well, we are forced to put a number on it. It would be easier for us to say `low 20s', but the media want a number. It's a bit stupid, really, because if it's 21 in La Trobe Street, it won't be 21 at Ringwood, Frankston and Tullamarine. But we do have a number of models, and experience comes into it."
© 1992 The Age
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