3-day forecasts of temperature, precipitation and wind. Forecasts have to be provided for several regions in the country. Short-term weather forecasts are relevant for the general public to plan activities, while also being reliable. See our methodology section for more information.
| Data location | https://reg.bom.gov.au/australia/charts/viewer/index.sht - https://reg.bom.gov.au/australia/charts/viewer/index.shtml Bureau of Meteorology, Interactive Forecast maps for upcoming 7 days, map embedded as png file https://reg.bom.gov.au/catalogue/data-feeds.shtml#foreca - 7-day forecasts for districts, as well as towns and cities within districts. Files for towns and cities are available in bulk (published separately per district). The forecasts for 7 days include all data. Precise information for precipitation in separate dataset ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/gen/fwo/IDN11051.txt - Text file containing all required information |
| Data licence | https://www.bom.gov.au/other/copyright.shtml |
| Data format | HTML, TXT, XML |
| Reviewer | Danny Lämmerhirt |
| Submitters | anonymous |
| Last modified | Wed Dec 07 2016 03:55:55 GMT+0000 (UTC) |
The initial submission was accepted, but with minor changes. More direct links to the data were added, to show where the data can be found. Findability: The website was fairly easy to find (first google result, when querying "weather forecast data Australia". The website displays "data services" on the homepage. Two clicks further users can find the FTP access page. It was a bit hard to understand that the required data are available without registration. The meteorological service provides various entry points to the data, and it was not immediately obvious which one to take for the assessement. Data from the FTP server is available for free, as stated here: https://reg.bom.gov.au/reguser/ Bulk: The data is separated per districts (including forecasts for several towns per district). Each file contains data over a certain timeframe, including all cities / towns of a district. There is a fair amount of data split across files. But the data can be directly addressed because they use consistent identifiers: “Files are overwritten with each issue and file names are unchanging allowing for direct addressing.” See here: https://reg.bom.gov.au/catalogue/textforecasts.pdf Therefore the data can count as bulk. However, the data is usable for private use, redistribution is not allowed. Therefore the data is not openly licensed. The original submitter indicated to be a "national manager of weather services". Thank you for contributing to the Global Open Data Index.