Responding to community feedback
The latest round of website updates are now live.
Based on your feedback, we have:
- added more town, city and place names to the weather map
- set the map to remember your most recent position
- added alpine weather, including forecast snow on the weather map
- made changes to tab names and page layouts to help you find what you're looking for.
Today's update follows the 31 March website update when we added today's forecast to the 7-day forecast, improved search with postcodes, and added radar coverage to the rain radar and weather map.
Thank you for all your website feedback. Please keep telling us what you like, and what improvements you’re keen to see.
Rain radar and weather maps
On Rain radar and weather maps you can now see:
- more town, city and place names on the map
- 3 hourly snow forecast
- increased map height and adjustable timezone in map settings.
In this update, we've added about 100 place names to the map, more than half of those are in the Northern Territory and Queensland. In customer feedback, people regularly ask for more locations to give them familiar markers and help them locate themselves.
We review requests and check them against the current map, legacy maps and population data. We want to create a map layer with good coverage and well-known reference points. It also needs to be easy to read and select locations, including on mobile phones.
We continue to listen to feedback and we'll be adding more place names in future releases.
Additionally, when you revisit Rain radar and weather maps or Forecasts and observations, the map will remember your most recent map position. Don't forget you can also use your saved favourite locations to quickly find your most frequently visited map locations. Learn how to use favourite locations.
Navigation
We've listened to your feedback and made changes to tabs and page layouts to help you find the information you're looking for.
People have told us that navigating to forecasts and observations for districts and states is hard. The changes, combined with last month's search uplift, make weather information for forecast areas and regions easier to find.
For example, Forecasts and observations now offers information across 3 tabs:
- Forecasts – major cities, state and territory
- Observations – capital city and district, state and territory
- Map – interactive weather map.
Similar navigation changes have been made to Coasts and oceans, state, territory and forecast district pages.
Alpine weather
The updated Alpine regions page provides weather maps and forecasts for snow resorts, towns, and remote areas in Australia's alpine regions.
Alpine regions offers information across 2 tabs:
- Forecasts – alpine districts and locations
- Map – 3 hourly snow, wind and temperature forecasts.
Forecasts and warnings
We have restored UV Index to the hourly forecast and fixed an issue with 7 day forecast data not loading for some users.
We've also refined some of our warning information to support public safety and decision making:
- flood warning details for rivers and catchments are presented in order from upstream to downstream location
- river height site elevation in metres (mAHD) has been added to river heights tables in flood watches and warnings
- tropical cyclone ocean wind warnings and technical bulletins use 24-hour Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) for all time stamps.