Weather forecasting gets closer to your farm as seasonal challenges rise

And they’ll need as much help as they can find if the volatility of weather in the past five years is any indicator of climate trends ahead.  

The Bureau of Meteorology’s (BOM) new $77 million supercomputer technology - switched on a few months ago - has about 16 times more computing capacity than the gear the weather service previously employed.

The Met Bureau has also begun tapping into more precise and better quality geostationary satellite imagery switched on in mid- 2015 after Japan launched its Himawari-8 weather satellite.

While predicting Australia’s increasingly erratic weather is considered about the hardest job for forecasters anywhere in the world, the past year has seen big improvements in meteorologists' ability to interpret what’s ahead in agricultural areas.

Finer analytical modeling means there are now 2000 grid points from which to assess weather information and to account for localised climate and geographic conditions, as opposed to just 120 a year ago.

Forecast resolution areas will zoom into 60 kilometre grid areas – and much smaller – down from 250km before.

Forecasters’ short- to mid-term outlooks for rainfall, temperature, wind and humidity activity should also be notably be less patchy as the period between seven-day and monthly outlooks is filled in with more useful fortnightly and three-week expectations, updated weekly.

Outlook forecasting skills are also set to improve by about 10 per cent thanks to the new tools available, said the Met Bureau’s assistant director of climate information services, Neil Plummer.

By 2018-19 regional resolution forecasts would zero down to farming district resolution areas of just five kilometre radius.

Some experimental data may be available at this local level even before then.

Mr Plummer told the recent National Farmers Federation Congress a lot of work was being done to beef up seasonal forecasting efforts for farmers and improve the relevance of weather reporting to more localised production areas.

Weather forecasting to help manage the variability of Australian weather is worth an estimated $1.6 billion annually to the farm sector, says the Centre for International Economics (CIE).

That is far, far more than the sectors with the next keenest interest in, and sensitivity to, weather events - the construction sector ($192m), oil and gas ($93m), or water supply services ($28m).

Mr Plummer said farm productivity losses caused by La Nina-related weather extremes including flash flooding and extended rain events at harvest cost agriculture about $2b in 2010-11.

However, better seasonal forecasting capacity by the BOM and its global partners had potential to be worth more than $1b every year to the sector, according to the CIE.

That improved insight was critical in Australia’s case because research by BOM and the CSIRO had found the climate change challenges ahead were getting more volatile.

Average rainfall in northern Australia was becoming more uncertain as tropical cyclone numbers decreased, but their intensity grew; the intensity of extreme daily rain events was also rising across most of the continent, but southern Australia’s average rainfall was declining and drought periods increasing, and more hot days and fewer cool days were expected everywhere.

“There has been good progress in seasonal forecasting, but much more needs to be done so we can be better prepared,” he said.

“Australia has the most extreme and variable climate in the world and it’s one of the biggest risks facing agribusiness across the sector - not just farmers.”

Mr Plummer said it was one thing to be better able to forecast what the weather was doing, but the next thing the Met Bureau, the farm sector and regional communities must focus on was using the new knowledge resources to change management practices and adapt infrastructure and production investment to handle the new weather conditions.

That focus should involve players across the entire agricultural supply chain, and seek partners beyond agriculture to work as part of a national effort.