Weather bureau needs a reboot over its new website

Press-ganged into the climate wars, the Bureau of Meteorology should be acutely aware of avoiding controversy. But it has needlessly courted widespread fury with a $4.1 million website upgrade that has upset both its political masters and the Australian public.

The BOM launched the new website last week as the storm and bushfire season loomed, with record October heat in parts of Queensland and NSW and deluges in Melbourne and Brisbane.

People revolted against the redesign, claiming it was harder to read and less detailed than the old version. Media meteorologists were also angry and even one of the BOM’s own admitted on ABC Radio that he didn’t like the new site and was still using the old one. Queensland Premier David Crisafulli blamed the “flawed” website for failing to alert residents of south-east Queensland to be prepared for the weekend’s serious storms. Nationals leader David Littleproud piled on, saying the website upgrade was “a joke”, and farmers who relied on forecasting services had long been critical of the old website.

The Environment Minister Murray Watt belatedly admitted the bureau was “not meeting many users’ expectations” and hauled in the bureau’s acting CEO, Peter Stone, to demand fixes to the website as soon as possible. Briefings are expected to be held by Friday with state and territory emergency services ministers.

Global warming and the accompanying threats of drought, flood and fire have not only polarised opinions, they have changed the way people discuss the weather. These days, even the language used by authorities and the media has become increasingly hyperbolic: Southern Cross University described the 2022 Lismore floodwater as enough to “fill half of Sydney Harbour”; Melissa, the hurricane currently churning through the Caribbean, has been dubbed “the storm of the century”.

Little wonder that a vocal defender of the need to fight global warming, the billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, tried to turn down the temperature on his personal website on Wednesday, calling for a rethink on the “doomsday view of climate change”.

In such fraught times, the BOM needed to tread lightly. Instead, it unwittingly allowed itself to become a political football with its ill-thought-through introduction of the new website. The bureau said in a statement that it had received positive feedback during its testing phase for the website over the past 15 months. “We expect satisfaction to increase as customers become accustomed to the new website and discover its benefits,” the bureau said.

However, the bureau’s upgrade was launched in a pivotal month for Australian farmers, many of whom start harvesting with a weather eye for natural disasters during spring. It would have been preferable that the launch of the new product had taken place at a less critical time, giving onboarding users more notice and time to become familiar with the new system, as well as calming the outrage.

That said, website redesigns invariably take some time to gain popular acceptance. But the BOM’s upgrade is an astonishing disconnect with users. It is a victory of process over purpose and practicality.

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