There’s relief in sight for local residents, farmers, fishers and visitors around Corner Inlet who have struggled with accurate weather forecasting since the shuttering of the jointly run BoM-South Gippsland Shire Council Yanakie weather station in July.
Thanks to the hard work and tireless advocacy of committed Yanakie locals, the Prom Coast will soon benefit from cutting-edge, hyper-local weather forecasting, with a $10,000 grant from the Gardiner Foundation allowing the Yanakie community to install a new weather station and partner with Jane’s Weather, an Australian platform that blends live local data with artificial intelligence to deliver precise, area-specific forecasts.
Robert Tracy from the Yanakie Progress Association confirmed that the group had been awarded the grant and that the funds would cover both the cost of a new station and its upkeep for years to come.
“We’re very grateful to the Gardiner Foundation and the Gippsland Community Foundation,” Mr Tracy said. “This model gives us the local data and forecasts we need for a lot less than the Bureau was charging.”
Earlier negotiations with the Bureau of Meteorology revealed maintenance quotes between $17,000 and $30,000 per year, which South Gippsland Shire Council was not prepared to fund in the absence of a new government grant to cover the cost. The new approach, by contrast, will operate almost entirely automatically and require little maintenance beyond the occasional cleaning of its solar panel.
Once installed, the Yanakie weather station will feed live data to Jane’s Weather, just as the Alpine community of Mansfield does through its own station. Jane’s platform combines local readings with multiple forecasting models and machine-learning algorithms to correct for regional quirks - sea breezes, temperature inversions, and wind shifts unique to a coastal region like Corner Inlet.
The result is a hyper-local forecast that updates constantly on a proposed South Gippsland Shire council website, southgippslandweather.com.au, where it is hoped other local independent weather stations across the Shire will follow suit and provide data to the website as well.
In Mansfield, this system has already proven its worth, helping farmers plan spraying and harvest times to the hour, while providing outdoor operators and tourism businesses with unprecedented reliability. The Yanakie model will offer similar benefits to dairy farmers, fishers, tourism operators and boaters across a roughly 100-kilometre area, from Foster and Fish Creek down to Wilsons Promontory and out over Bass Strait.
The project’s launch comes at a time when the Bureau of Meteorology’s newly redesigned website is under fire across Australia, criticised for being harder to navigate and less locally relevant, especially for farmers and people on the land. With climate change biting and weather even more unpredictable than ever before, the refusal of government on local and federal levels to fund weather stations is a worrying sign, and prompts the question: is private weather forecasting the way forward for Australia? David Barrett
