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Weather Data Services

The Bureau of Meteorology provides Data Services for a number of real-time forecast and observation products that can be used for ingestion by computers. These products are made available on the Bureau ftp site ftp://ftp2.bom.gov.au/anon/gen/fwo/.
A product catalogue is also available.

User information

The Bureau does not guarantee the availability of information on the ftp site.
Please read how to access the Bureau's ftp site and its structure.
The Service Announcements page details changes to Bureau services.
Use of data should be in accordance with the copyright notice and disclaimer.

Secondary distribution of Bureau of Meteorology information currently freely available on the Bureau's website and ftp site requires formal permission. Correct attribution of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology as the source of Bureau information is an important component of any secondary distribution permission that may be granted. Where Bureau information is to be used on a website, permission for use of that information should be applied for by the website owner.

For further information on these and other products send your request to us via our feedback system or contact the Bureau Office in your capital city.

Services from the Australian Digital Forecast Database (ADFD)

The ADFD contains official weather forecast elements produced by the Bureau of Meteorology, such as temperature, rainfall and weather types, stored in a gridded format.
Text forecasts and warnings are available in XML for Victoria, Tasmania, New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory.

Forecasts for locations are available in both short and long form.

Precis style (a short summary, less than 30 characters)
Descriptive style

Forecasts are also available for land districts and coastal waters zones - Maps of the area boundaries.

Weather warnings are available in:

XML and AMOC. View XML schema and AMOC schema.
RSS feeds for each state. Refer to RSS catalogue.

Forecasts and warnings are only available in text and html for South Australia, Western Australia, Queensland and Northern Territory.

Registration is required to access the forecast grids in NetCDF or Grib2 formats. Grids are available for a number of weather elements for the next 7 days. Each grid has forecasts at a 6 kilometer spacing.
The ADFD user guide (.doc | .pdf) contains further details on how to access the database.
Sample grids from the ADFD.

Australian Capital City précis forecast and observations

The following products are both shown on the Bureau's home page.

Forecasts - HTML | Text (updated whenever latest information is available, changes to tomorrow's forecast at 3pm AEST)
Observations - HTML (updated every 5 minutes)

Computer model forecasts

Operational Consensus Forecasts (OCF) - 7 day forecasts for around 700 locations. The product description document can be found here.
- 00Z - IDY02122
- 06Z - IDY02128
- 12Z - IDY02123
- 18Z - IDY02129
Gridded forecast rainfall - (Images freely available. NetCDF files by subscription only)
UV Index and sun protection times
Computer model grid outputs are also available for Registered Users.
Images used on the Interactive weather and wave forecast maps (View documentation for ACCESS and AUSWAVE data files).

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Observations

Individual stations

The Bureau provides its observational data in a number of formats for use as a data feed. The 72 hour station based observational products are available in 4 file formats.
To get the URL of a data feed for a weather station -

click on a product link below,
click on the link to the appropriate weather station,
click on the link labeled Other formats, and
select the link to the format that suits your needs.

Table of available product styles for each state

Australian State	State Coastal Waters	State - All Observations	State Capital City Area
Canberra Area	Not applicable	Not applicable	Canberra area
New South Wales - Sydney	http://www.bom.gov.au/nsw/observations/coastal.shtml	New South Wales	Sydney area
Victoria - Melbourne	http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDV60700.shtml	Victoria	Melbourne area
Queensland - Brisbane	http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDQ60700.shtml	Queensland	Brisbane area
South Australia - Adelaide	http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDS60700.shtml	South Australia	Adelaide area
Western Australia - Perth	http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDW60700.shtml	Western Australia	Perth area
Tasmania - Hobart	http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDT60700.shtml	Tasmania	Hobart area
Antarctic Area	Not applicable	Antarctica	Not applicable
Northern Territory - Darwin	http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDD60700.shtml	Northern Territory	Darwin area

Summaries for Australia

A summary of observations across Australia is compiled every 15 minutes and files for the last 24 hours are available on the ftp directory.

Product	Formats	Filename	Notes
Real-Time Synoptic Observations - Australian Region (IDY03000)	Data (.axf), or Shape file (.shp)	IDY03000.YYYYMMDDTTTT	File format (MS Word)
Real-Time METAR Observations - Australian Region (IDY03100)	Data (.axf), or Shape file (.shp)	IDY03100.YYYYMMDDTTTT	File format (MS Word)

where YYYYMMDDTTTT is a date-time stamp in UTC (add 10 hours for Eastern Standard Time).

Agricultural Bulletins in XML

Agricultural bulletins containing a summary of agricultural type observations on a daily time scale are available in XML for each State. Click on the state name for the corresponding XML version of the Agricultural Bulletin.

Radar

Radar images are available from the ftp site. The filename contains the unique ID code for the Radar, the projection and date/time in UTC. The map layers used on the Bureau's radar viewer are available in .png file format.