Mackay weather radar outage for replacement works

Advising members of an outage to the Mackay (Mount Bassett) weather radar, for up to 6 months, due to replacement works by the Bureau of Meteorology (Bureau).

Purpose

From 1 June 2023, subject to any unforeseen delays, the Bureau will commence works to replace the Mackay (Mount Bassett) weather radar with dual-polarised Doppler radar technology.   The old radar will be switched off at this time, to allow the new tower and radome to be installed. The Mackay radar will need to be offline for up to 6 months for Bureau technicians to complete this work. The work will take place when severe weather is less likely, reducing the disruption to the community. 

There will be no impact to the Bureau's aviation forecasts and warnings, which are informed by observations from a range of assets including satellites, upper atmosphere monitoring and automatic weather stations. During the outage period, those seeking situational awareness of rain can use a range of alternative sources:

• The Gladstone, Bowen and Emerald radars provide some overlapping coverage for the region and can be accessed on the Bureau's website and 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 the Bureau's website and show cloud cover and lightning strikes.

Once complete, the community, aviators, emergency services and local industry will benefit from dual-polarised Doppler radar technology for observing real-time rainfall and wind conditions across large areas. The new technology will provide equivalent image quality to the new Greenvale and Richmond weather radars.  These replacement works are part of the Bureau's ongoing work to enhance and improve the Australian radar and observation network. We are delivering 8 new radars, plus upgrades to 46 radars, almost 700 automatic weather stations and 384 flood warning network assets across the country.