Will BOM bomb its forecasts and could AI do better?

As we head into 2025 with Australia living up to its reputation of a land of huge weather contrasts, our farmers are not the only people wondering if our national weather forecaster, the Bureau of Meteorology, will get it right this year.

It's a very valid question, because the BOM bombed out in late 2023 when they told us that 2024 was going to be much drier than usual.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers blame the rising cost of living on everything from the war in Ukraine to the former Coalition government and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. It's never their own fault, but maybe they should add the Bureau to the blame list when it comes to rising grocery prices.

After it issued that drought warning, graziers reduced their cattle herds and farmers held off on crop planting. As the Australian Financial Review reported, "Frustrated farmers and other weather-dependent businesses in hospitality and tourism are counting the multimillion-dollar cost of the rain deluge over summer and the Bureau of Meteorology's big dry warning that turned out to be wrong. Australia experienced a very wet summer, with seasonal rainfall across the continent 19 per cent above the 1961-1990 average, according to the BOM. The big wet contrasts sharply to the September and November forecasts from the BOM, when it declared El Nino for the first time since 2015-16, and said warmer and drier conditions were more likely over spring and summer, with increased risk of heatwaves and fires…"

This year they are taking the opposite approach, based on a likely La Nina influence. Their latest long range forecast for January to March issued on January 2 states:. A wetter than average season is likely for large parts of eastern, western and northern Australia:

• warmer than average days are likely across much of southern and eastern Australia and parts of the tropical north;
• warmer than average nights are very likely with an increased chance of unusually high overnight temperatures nationwide.

Based on the assumption that this time they might hopefully have got it right, our food producers are likely doing all that is necessary to ensure we have adequate production for the year ahead.

But can we rely on BOM for short term forecasts over the days or week ahead? Heading through Christmas and New Year, our weather has been very mixed, with parts of Eastern Australia ranging from far north Queensland down through New South Wales have experienced heavy rainfall and flash flooding, while Victoria and parts of West Australia have faced bushfires and heatwaves.

There's nothing new about that and it's not down to the much-hyped "climate change." As Dorothea Mackellar wrote early last century in My Country, we are a land of drought and flooding rains.

Meanwhile, Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate recently said he had no faith in the Bureau of Meteorology and had feared a repeat of the coast's unexpected deadly Christmas 2023 storms, something that keeps him awake at night.

This New Year's Eve, before the coast's fireworks display, he told visitors to bring a rain poncho "just in case the BOM gets it wrong, which is 90 percent of the time.."

He's obviously no fan, and he's not alone. In our neck of the woods on the Sunshine Coast, our local television weather presenter about a week before Christmas told us that "tomorrow there will be set-in rain, not showers," with extensive heavy falls. But the next day it would clear, with the rain moving north.