Issued: Wednesday 19 April 2023
The Brisbane (Marburg) weather radar, which acts as a secondary radar for Brisbane (Mt Stapylton), is being replaced with dual-polarised Doppler radar technology.
This is the same technology that Brisbane (Mt Stapylton) uses for observing real-time rainfall and wind conditions across large areas.
From 26 April 2023, subject to any unforeseen delays, the Bureau of Meteorology will commence works at the existing radar site.
The new technology will make Marburg a more reliable secondary weather radar, providing equivalent image quality to the Mt Stapylton weather radar. During the radar upgrade the Marburg radar will be offline for approximately 6 months.
During this time, the existing Mt Stapylton weather radar will continue to provide coverage and a temporary radar at Brisbane Airport will serve as an additional weather radar for the region.
The Bureau’s Chief Customer Officer Dr Peter Stone said the radar needs to go offline for technicians to complete the work of installing the new Doppler radar. Once completed it will serve the community, emergency services and local industry with its real-time observation technology.
“The Marburg radar 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,” Dr Stone said.
Anyone seeking situational awareness of rain can use alternative sources including the existing Brisbane (Mt Staplyton) radar and the temporary radar at Brisbane Airport.
The Bureau’s MetEye service also provides publicly accessible images showing temperature, rain and wind information. The community can also access satellite images from the Himawari-8 satellite on the Bureau’s website, showing cloud cover and lightning strikes.
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.
During the planned outage period, up-to-date forecasts and warnings will continue to be published on the Bureau’s website and on the BOM Weather app.
The new weather radar at Brisbane (Marburg) is scheduled for completion in late-2023.
