NOTE: THERE ARE NO CHANGES TO OCF DATA PAGES

A number of changes will be made to these sections of AWN in the next few weeks. A change in the way data is received means that some data will cease and some will change in its availability.

Reason for the changes

I started Australian Weather News 30 years ago because of my interest in weather and a desire to make detailed Australian weather data more easily accessible than it is through other sources. For most of that time I have used advertising to help pay the Bureau of Meteorology charges of several thousand dollars a year for this data as well as the substantial costs of maintaining a very large website.

Unfortunately, although user numbers remain the same, the increasing use of ad-blocking software means that I no longer earn enough from advertising to pay BoM data subscriptions. As a result, I will be relying on publicly available data from other feeds to maintain the continuity of the much-used DWS and DCD sections of the site.

The impact on you

Complex changes such as these will take a while to implement, and there is a degree of trial and error involved as well. These two sections of Australian Weather News will continue to be available, but expect to see occasional weird output as experiments are tried and unexpected consequences occur in real time.

Changes affecting both the DWS and DCD pages

• Minimum and maximum temperatures will continue to be available to one decimal place for Automatic Weather Stations, but only to the nearest whole degree for weather stations run by human observers. Because grass minimum temperatures are only taken at manned sites, they will also only be reported to the nearest whole degree.
• AWS minima and maxima will be reported for non-standard periods: minima for the 24 hours to 10am EST and maxima for the 24 hours to 10pm EST. On most days these will be no different to the standard 9am to 9am periods, but there will be occasions when they differ significantly.
  
  An advantage is that the data becomes available earlier each day, especially maxima which become available late evening rather than in the afternoon of the next day. I can also begin checking the data for errors sooner each day.
• Manned site minima, grass minima and maxima will continue to use the 9am Bureau standard cycle with minima and grass minima for the 24 hours TO 9am and maxima for the 24 hours FROM 9am. This data will be available soon after the observations are made at 9am in each time zone.
• Rainfall will continue to be available for each 24-hour period to 9am local time for about 2000 sites routinely reporting daily rainfall in real time. Rainfall observations will become available as soon as they are received from AWS and manual weather stations, and a full rain list including rain-only stations will be processed soon after 2pm daily.
  
  The downside is that the "postal rainfall readings" at an additional ~4000 rainfall stations will no longer be available. At these stations, the observers post a form containing the month's observations to the BoM after the end of each month. You may have seen how these add many stations in each district in the Daily Climatic Data archives for past months.
• Provisional RAINFALL records set or equalled section: As all rainfall is reported to the nearest 0.2mm to 9am daily, this section doesn't have the problems of temperatures so should continue much as before.
• Daily sunshine, evaporation and wind run data: These readings will be discontinued as they are only available on subscription.
• Daily maximum wind gusts: The subscription data carrying details of maximum wind gusts at all Automatic Weather Stations will be discontinued. However, I also receive some maximum wind gusts through the aviation weather data feed, and the highest of these will continue to become available through each day in the High AWS wind reports section at the bottom of the Daily Weather Summary. This is a real-time feed and is not guaranteed to be either complete or accurate, so is unsuitable for use in generating records.

Daily Weather Summary

• Provisional records set or equalled today: This section of the Daily Weather Summary will be the hardest to maintain because of the mix of non-standard hours and whole and decimal degrees in the temperature sections. In addition, wind gusts from the aviation feed are neither complete nor accurate, so are unsuitable for determining records. There is no problem with rainfall data which will follow the same standards as before.
  
  The manual checking of daily records for correctness and accuracy is an essential part of this section, and I will be considering how sustainable this will be given the variations in standards that now exist. This section is suspended while I make that decision.