Chalk One Up for the Weather Bureau

[SeaSaw]

Of late the Weather bureau has not got it right a lot of the time ??? and that other site (buoyweather) has been right on the money ;)

There has been a fair bit of criticism of the bureau for their forecasts but today they seem to have got it right by predicting 15 -20 knots today and 25-30 knots tonight while buoyweather has predicted under 10 knots all day and only rising to 12 knots by 4am tommorrow.

Now I am not trying to defend the weather bureau, but thought it important to note that neither is perfect. It just shows how important it is to make your own judgements based on as many sources of information you can find.

So lets all applaud the Bureau today ;D ;D ;D

Cheers,

Mark

[Y-Not]

I my be ignoirant but I have never heard of buoyweather. Care to shed some light for the uneducated? [smiley=help.gif]

[Hookem_Herby]

http://buoy.ocens.net/wxnav.jsp?region=AE&program=nww3BW1&grb=nww3&latitude=-27.0&longitude=153.75&zone=10&units=e

[mackmauler]

Mark, you are not totally right about that, it wasnt 15-20 till after midday, 10-12 was common through the morning, at this time of yr its common to be heading in by lunch anyway. the widest waveriders showed under a meter into the afternoon, thats extremely workable, far from a wind warning.
Rob

[SeaSaw]

Yeah Rob, very true that it was workable this morning ???, but I chose to ingore this morning as I reackon they were both wrong. The Bureau I think had had it at 20 to 25 which they downgraded to 13 to 18 this morning and buoyweather had 2 to 3 knots. The actual was right in the middle so no cigar to either ;D

Cheers

Mark

[SeaSaw]

PS. in my first post I should have said 13 to 18 rather than 15 to 20 for the bureau's prediction for today. I just rounded it up cause I cant get used to these new forecasts like 13 - 18 or 8 to 13 etc ???

[mackmauler]

Still Mark by the time we get the downgraded forecast from BOM its too late, buoyweather comes out well in front. they had stuck there necks out days in advance and BOM had there chain smoker on who ducked out for a quickie this morning ::)
Rob

[SeaSaw]

I have been watching the difference between the two forecasts for a while now and this is what I reackon happens.

Buoyweather is a computer generated model, so what you get is the MOST LIKELY forecast from a pretty standard computer model. I doubt there is much human intervention in intepreting multiple possible weather models.

The Bureau look at a number of different model and make a human based assessment of the possible scenarios. What they seem to do when there is some difference in the models is err on the side of a conservative forecast. Probably to protect there liability if the worst comes true.

When the weather pattern is very stable, the two seem to line up pretty well. As soon as there is some instability in the pattern the Bureau's forecast gets very conservative. They then downgrade the forecast when they look out the window and find out the worst case scenaio is not happening ... but this is too late for us fishos ???

This is just my opinion from my observations, as I don't really know what happens in these organisations. Based on recent results the buoyweather predictions are coming true more often though.

Cheers,

Mark

[devocean]

For those of you who know anything about GIS (Global Information Systems) systems buoy weather is actually based on this system I believe. If you have arc view or an other GIS program like Arc View and you collect data for a year you can create your own forcast for you particular area based on certain variables. If your bored its worth a go takes a long time unless you can download the data from somewhere.

Devocean