The Bureau of Meteorology and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) have formed a partnership with the aim of providing more regular and accessible weather information to the general public.
The partnership will comprise a range of projects, programs and online content, including weather science explainers, opportunities to chat live with forecasters and interactive weather tools.
Announcing the partnership, the Minister for the Environment and Energy, Josh Frydenberg said it would bring together the two Agencies’ expertise and capabilities to provide more detailed weather information and further explain the science behind forecasts and phenomena.
Mr Frydenberg said the first partnership project would be a regular weekly agricultural forecast direct from Bureau meteorologists every Sunday on ABC’s Landline rural affairs program.
The second would be a YouTube video series called Weird Weather, presented by Nate Byrne which focuses on unusual meteorological phenomena.
“Managing the impact of weather is particularly important to our rural and regional communities,” Mr Frydenberg said.
“It is estimated the Bureau’s services will deliver nearly $12 billion in benefits to the agricultural sector alone in the next decade.”
He said that as Australia’s emergency broadcaster, the ABC had worked closely for decades with the Bureau to broadcast weather warnings to help Australians ready themselves for severe weather, including bushfires, flooding, storms, heatwaves and cyclones.
Mr Frydenberg said the Bureau already had strong engagement with Australians online as it had more than a million social media followers, its app had been used more than 96 million times since it was launched in October 2016 and its website recorded some 1.6 billion unique page views in the last financial year alone.
