General News
20 September, 2025
Weather data forecast fright for Halloween
A major increase in service costs for the local Automatic Weather Station has forced Yarriambiack Shire Council to call for urgent support to safeguard the future of the critical piece of infrastructure.
The Council currently owns and maintains the Warracknabeal AWS – one of two in the municipality – under a 10-year service agreement with the Bureau of Meteorology.
Unlike most weather stations across Australia, which are managed entirely by the Bureau, the Council is responsible for all servicing and maintenance costs.
With emergency services, aviators, the agriculture industry, and the broader community relying on accurate local data and forecasting, the Yarriambiack Shire Council mayor, Kylie Zanker, said the importance of the AWS “cannot be overstated, especially during high-risk events such as the Little Desert National Park fire earlier this year”.
“Our weather station has provided vital, real-time data to the region since 1969, supporting not only local needs but also feeding into global and regional weather monitoring,” she said.
The annual servicing fee for the AWS is set to rise dramatically under a new three-year agreement – from $12,700 to $27,959 in the first year and approaching $30,000 within three years – despite servicing intervals being reduced to one service per annum.
“This increase is quite substantial,” Ms Zanker said.
Without external financial support, Council will be unable to maintain the AWS to the required standard, leading to its proposed decommissioning on October 31, 2025.
Sparke Agriculture director, Matthew Sparke said the potential loss was a concern as his agronomy experience told him farmers always made better decisions when they could maximise the information they had available to them – with rainfall a particularly localised dataset, and buying their own weather station could easily cost “five or six grand” with additional options such as moisture probes adding to ongoing service costs.
He said some farmers would baulk at such extra expenses, so the only alternative was to rely on BoM data from a nearby station.
“Temperature would be probably more consistent across an area of, say, 20 to 30 (kilometres) around a town, so you certainly could use the temperature data (but) wind can be a bit more variable and rainfall is highly variable,” he said.
“We always look around the region after it rains, so we get a better understanding of where they've sat with the rainfall, because that's going to affect yield potential."
Speaking to The Warracknabeal Herald while ironically attending an Adelaide national workshop on frost, he said the critical weather condition was a good example of the need for farmers to have good local forecast information at hand as early as possible, to gauge – as an example – "what severity it may be in spring when we’ve got crops flowering”.
“If we have a catastrophic frost event, then we've got to really know what temperature for how long in individual areas, and then assess that by farmers' risk zones within their farm,” Mr Sparke said.
Ms Zanker said while providing meteorological data was not a core local government function, Council understood “losing this facility would be a significant setback for our community”.
“We have written to Federal and State Ministers, as well as the Victorian Emergency Management Commissioner, seeking their urgent assistance to ensure the station remains in service.”
The Bureau of Meteorology was contacted for comment, but did not reply before the deadline.