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.

Our beach-side enclave received nothing that day as forecast but the next "clear day" miraculously produced 60 mm in the gauge.

If they can't get it right a day or a week in advance, how can they, the CSIRO, the Climate Council or Albo tell us what the climate might be like by the end of the century?

They can't. Sorry to disillusion all the hand-wringers and news presenters who keep claiming recent weather events are "unprecedented" because of climate change. History says otherwise and here are some real facts: There have always been cyclones and floods and they have not become more severe, as BOM's own records confirm.

We have had floods, wild weather, droughts and cyclones since early settlement, including the devastating 1974 Brisbane flood, Cyclone Althea which hit Townsville on Christmas Eve in 1971 with three deaths, Cyclone Tracy which flattened Darwin with 71 fatalities on Christmas Day in 1974, and Cyclone Justin in 1917 with 34 fatalities. But worse than any of those - "Cyclone Mahina was the deadliest cyclone in recorded Australian history, and also likely the most intense tropical cyclone ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere. Mahina struck Bathurst Bay, Cape York Peninsula, Queensland, on 4 March 1899, and its winds and enormous storm surge combined to kill more than 300 people".

Brisbane experienced the Great Flood of 1893 - the Black February flood - when the Brisbane River burst its banks on three occasions with about 35 fatalities.The highest 24-hour rainfall total for anywhere in Australia was 907 mm at Crohamhurst, in the Brisbane catchment, on February 3, 1893.

Nothing in recent times comes close to those; there were no coal-fired power stations back then, and as former chief scientist Alan Finkel admitted to a Senate hearing several years ago, if Australia cut all its CO2 emissions immediately, its impact on world climate would be negligible.

But when it comes to forecasting, a pair of scientists critical of BOM think we could do better if we let Artificial Intelligence (AI) in on the act.

Well, I'm no fan, as I wrote in an article titled Beyond Mad Max with Dystopian AI: "... the charmless i-bot that answers almost all government and major business phone calls, the source behind our internet searches and algorithms, the brain behind the helpful tools that do a student's assignments or write a novel (badly) or create nude images of anybody from a normal photograph .. get the picture?...

But is there a useful place for AI in weather forecasting? Yes, according to the very active and productive Dr Jennifer Marohasy, an Australian biologist who has devoted many years to studying national climate records as well as corals on the Great Barrier Reef, and her husband Dr John Abbot, a highly qualified scientist and senior fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.

In her December newsletter, Dr Marohasy stated, "If the Bureau was serious about weather and climate forecasting it would give up with its pretend General Circulation Models.

John Abbot writes:

Weather and climate forecasts using Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly artificial neural networks (ANNs), are more reliable and skilful than traditional methods using General Circulation Models (GCMs). I have been publishing in the international peer-reviewed literature and running courses for Indonesian meteorologists, demonstrating the technique for over a decade. I first visited the Australian Bureau of Meteorology with Jennifer Marohasy in August 2011, to show the skill of my monthly forecasts using AI, relative to the Bureau's using General Circulation Models that attempt to mimic the physical process. These are the same models used by the IPCC and have proven unable to forecast more than 4 days in advance.

The Bureau has steadfastly refused to consider AI despite it showing a capacity to produce skilful location-specific rainfall forecasts from one day (models developed by Google) to 18 months in advance (models developed by Abbot and Marohasy)."

I'll leave that debate to the scientists, because I've found a seemingly reliable weather forecaster right here at home. Donnie is an interloper who set up camp under our back deck some years ago and who occasionally appears sunning his lithe, muscular body on the deck or on a flat granite rock beside the fish pond as if he owns the place. A week ago we had a Mexican stand-off when I almost tripped over him right at the back door and he refused to move. But I knew from experience that within a few days we could count on some prolonged rain.

Who needs BOM or AI when we have Donnie the Water Dragon in our own backyard?