Flash-flooding in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, December 2003. Photo: Shaun Latham.

The Bureau has this year released new software to improve collection of locally-based flood warning rainfall and river level data. The Enviromonsoftware gives local agencies the capacity to collect, display and analyse data critical to their own flood response operations (Figure 6 ), and to speed transfer of these data to Bureau Flood Warning Centres for operational flood forecasting and warning. It offers greatly improved functionality and capacity relative to the previous software installed in over 50 Australian agencies. During the year, Bureau Regional Offices worked cooperatively with local agencies to replace most of the original software, and expand coverage to new sites. Further enhancement of the software now allows Internet transfer of data between local agencies and Bureau Flood Warning Centres, offering an alternative path to the Bureau Wide Area Network - and an emergency back-up to this critical operational function. A client-server version of the software is planned for 2004-05.

Figure 6. Graphical display of rainfall data collected by the Enviromon system as used by local agencies to assess flood conditions in real time.