Graphical Area Forecasts (GAFs)

Planned network maintenance is scheduled for 15 October 2026 from 2200 to 2220 AEDT (1100 to 1120 UTC). A brief interruption of up to 5-minutes (worst case 15-minutes) may occur to external data delivery, including to registered user pages, FTP and external email traffic may occur during this period. Any data will be queued and sent following the outage.

If any operational issues are observed, please contact the Duty Forecaster.

Tell us about your experience with our aviation weather products and services. Complete the Aviation weather services customer survey.


Accessing this Service

By entering this site, you acknowledge that this information is produced solely for use by the aviation industry, and you are aware that any information for the purposes of flight planning should be obtained from Airservices Australia.

Following requests from the aviation industry, the Bureau of Meteorology changed the format of Area Forecasts (ARFORs) from text based to graphical on 9 November 2017. The new format is known as a Graphical Area Forecast (GAF).

The GAF is a combination of graphical and textual information. The graphic is divided into areas that share common weather characteristics which are detailed in an associated table.

There were significant changes noticeable to users of ARFORs. These included changes to:

  • The number of forecast areas (10 GAFs in total for Australia, compared to 28 ARFORs) and therefore boundaries of each area;
  • validity periods;
  • the method of advising significant weather deterioration; and
  • wind and temperature information, which is presented in a separate Grid Point Wind and Temperature (GPWT) forecast product.

Download GAF video

Further information about the GAF, the GPWT forecast, as well as samples can be downloaded from the following links:

Please contact webav@bom.gov.au if you require any further information.