Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) has begun the second phase of works to replace its Serpentine weather radar, south of Perth, with a new dual-polarized Doppler radar to provide the local community and businesses with more reliable and up-to-date weather information.
The old radar will be switched off for up to 12 weeks while the new tower and radome are installed. Once complete, the community, emergency services and local industry will benefit from improved observations of real-time rainfall and wind conditions across large areas.
The Perth (Serpentine) radar upgrade is one part of a comprehensive weather observation network of more than 11,000 assets including satellites, upper atmosphere monitoring, automatic weather stations, ocean buoys and flood warning networks.
During the outage, there will be no impact to the Bureau’s forecasts and warnings, which are informed by observations from a range of assets including satellites, upper atmosphere monitoring and automatic weather stations.
Data from the recently upgraded Perth Airport radar will also be available on BoM’s website and the BOM Weather app. The Bureau’s MetEye service provides publicly accessible images showing temperature, rain and wind information.
The community can also access satellite images from the Himawari-8 satellite. These images are available from BoM’s website and show cloud cover and lightning strikes.