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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

Internal tensions at the organisation that tells us the weather - the Bureau of Meteorology - appear to be going from bad to worse.

Fresh revelations include that the Bureau’s daily forecasts, which many of us rely on, well, they might be getting less accurate.

And we’ve also learned that the renaming of the organisation was called a ‘rebrand’ internally, even though management publicly claimed they never attempted such a thing.

Today, Senior Reporter at The Saturday Paper, Rick Morton joins us again, with the latest on the agency formerly known as the BoM.

It’s Thursday, November 3.

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RUBY:

So, Rick, hello again. How are you?

RICK:

I'm good. Thanks for having me.

RUBY:

So it's been a week now since we last spoke. And when we talked it was about the Bureau of Meteorology and what was happening behind closed doors there. In that week you've continued to talk to people at the BoM, haven't you?

RICK:

Yeah. In fact, I can't keep up with the amount of people that have been sending me leaked documents, screenshots from internal systems at the Bureau, and particularly meteorologists and forecasters who have gotten in touch after my first piece to say, look, really important stuff. But there is a much bigger story here, and it's about the science.

RUBY:

Right, ok so tell me about that Rick. What are the people who have got in touch with you saying about what else is happening at the organisation, relating to the science?

RICK:

Yeah, the really fascinating thing that I had written off - you know, we've seen people saying 'why is the BoM always so inaccurate'? Why is their app saying there's going to be rain and there's been no rain all day or vice versa? And, you know, you just write it off as confirmation bias. But a lot of the meteorologists I was talking to said, if you think that your weather forecast has gotten worse recently, that's because it actually has. Which sounds crazy, right?

Except that the day-to-day weather forecast, when it's a normal day, there's no bushfire threat, there's no severe weather. It's just, you know, is it going to be sunny? Is it going to be cloudy? Is it going to be raining? That stuff is handled almost exclusively by this model of models and it's an automatic program. It takes a bunch of models from around the globe, looks at how successful they've been at predicting the weather in certain places in the last 30 days and then gives that information awaiting essentially, you know, the better the model prediction in the last 30 days, the more accurate it'll be. And then they spit out forecasts for 230,000 grids every day, twice a day across Australia.

So this model is producing a lot of information and most of the time over the 2-to-7 day forecast, the model is really good, it's really accurate, but within 24 hours... So on any given day, if the forecast is or the meteorologists believe that the forecast is wrong, that the model has got a few details incorrect, they have to fight to fix them.

And so they have to essentially argue with management to change that forecast. And often they're not allowed to.

RUBY:

Right. Okay. So forecasting is now done almost entirely by modelling. And even when forecasters can see a problem in that model, there isn't much they can do about it. And so really the accuracy of the forecast that the BoM is publishing is unclear. And I suppose that means that the fundamental role of the organisation, at least from the point of view of you or I, or anyone who who wants to go there to, you know, find out what the weather is going to be, that's that's being compromised.

RICK:

Yes…. So if there is no bushfire threat or if there's no likely severe weather, then essentially what they're saying is we don't care if the model said it's going to rain and it's not going to now because it's not worth us fixing it.

RUBY:

Hmm. Okay. And so, Rick, what else did your sources say to you about what's happening at the BoM at the moment?

RICK:

So to my mind, the most interesting thing is that quite a few different sources from different parts of the organisation, all meteorologists, but none who had spoken to each other. They all pointed out to me that one of the most concerning things is that because there are cutbacks in staff and in terms of scientific monitoring and observations that the Bureau of Meteorology is, it's an open secret. They said that they are not meeting their obligations under the World Meteorological Organisation.

RUBY:

Right. Okay. So can you tell me more about what those obligations are and how the cutbacks are affecting the BoM’s ability to meet them?

RICK:

Yeah. So the World Meteorological Organisation is incredibly important and it kept coming up in my first reporting round. I didn't do much with it because people kept saying the WMO is not going to be happy about this… And I was like, 'why do they have so much power'?

It's because there’s this global cooperation on monitoring and observation. So we've got accurate records, not just in Australia but everywhere.

Part of the way they do that is that the World Meteorological Organisation stipulates that you try and synchronise as much as possible the release of weather balloons every day from all of these locations around the world.

And so, every single day a weather balloon goes up in the morning and goes up at night…. and that gives us really, really stunningly accurate climate observations and weather observations in the upper atmosphere.

The Bureau of Meteorology has been cutting back on these weather balloon launches. So in some parts of Australia where they used to be at least one a day there are now just five in a given week. So it's one a day for just five days a week.

The Bureau of Meteorology will tell you that 95 per cent of all of its data now comes from satellites and that satellites are better than everything else that's ever been done. And that is true for the 95 per cent, but there's still 5 per cent. And the weather balloons are a really important part of that 5 per cent.

Now those balloons, when they get to the upper atmosphere, they produce data for aerological charts which are really important for airlines for a start, but also because it's crucial information that gets fed into the models, particularly around severe thunderstorms. And so the less data you have, the less relevant those models become. And the meteorologists essentially said to me, you know why when it's never been more important for the Bureau to do this kind of work. Why are we choosing to have less data?

RUBY:

And Rick, it's interesting because it sounds like these decisions that are being made around weather balloons, they're budget decisions. This is about trying to save the BoM money. But it's coming at a time when we know the Bureau has actually spent quite a lot of money, I think the figure that you told me last week was $750,000, on a rebrand.

RICK:

Yeah. At least. I mean, what we can't quantify on this rebrand and God, they tell you it's not a rebrand, it is a rebrand. We can't quantify, you know, the staff cost of actually making everyone wear uniforms that they've ordered, that they're going to start making public facing forecasters and people talking to the public - they're going to make them wear these uniforms, sort of like border force, but for the Bureau.

And the thing that's really, really angered staff is that they can see this disaster of a rebrand strategy unfolding, which has cost a fortune while there's been cutbacks in the actual science.

And it just drives them wild. And I understand where they're coming from because to watch that unfold, you've got to wonder where are the priorities in this organisation?

RUBY:

We’ll be back after this.

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RUBY:

Rick, it sounds like there is a lot of frustration amongst people who work at the Bureau of Meteorology around this branding exercise and, and this idea of renaming the BoM to the Bureau. When we last talked, the media department at the Bureau had denied that this was actually a rebrand at all. But tell me about what you've discovered since then.

RICK:

This is really important to get right, because as I keep saying elsewhere, it doesn't matter if they call it a rebrand or as I insisted it be called, a refresh. So they gave a statement to me the very first time, asked about it more than two weeks ago now. They said, and this is in writing. This is not a rebrand. Now, I don't care what they call it. I do care if they're lying to me about it. And what has emerged subsequently is that internally, the general manager of media and communications, who reports to Andrew Johnson, ultimately the CEO, that she had planned drinks for the team that had worked on this, what, quote unquote, spectacular branding operation and said in an email, you know, it's not every day that you have the opportunity to rebrand a much adored national organisation. Now the reason I'm fascinated by this is because, a, they were organising drinks to celebrate what was a disastrous launch, in the middle of major flooding in Victoria when people had already died. They didn’t delay the launch, but in the email asking people to come to drinks they delayed the drinks by a week and it’s all just been a bit farcical so I put questions in on Tuesday morning when I found out about this.

A couple of hours later I find out that the drinks had been cancelled. I wasn’t asking about the drinks. They knew that I knew about them, but I was asking why would you have this internal staff intranet where you call everything a rebrand until there's a public backlash Why are you being so coy and cagey with the language, and what does that tell us about what else is going on at the Bureau of Meteorology?

RUBY:

And what about, Rick, on the question of the forecasts themselves, whether or not this modelling is the way that the forecasts are being handled, this modelling and this resistance to allowing people to to change the forecasts to make them more accurate. What does the BoM say about that?

RICK:

The BoM essentially says that wherever there's evidence to intervene in a forecast, they will allow their meteorologists to intervene. That's what they say.

Archival tape – Senate Estimates Committee

“So if I can call the officers from the BoM, welcome…”

RICK:

Now, last Friday, director of the BoM, also known as the CEO, Dr. Andrew Johnson, he appeared before that Senate Estimates Committee in parliament

Archival tape – Dr Johnson

“I sincerely apologise if this commentary has caused confusion or uncertainty in the community that was certainly not our intention.”

RICK:

He apologised upfront for sort of that one of those non-apologies where it's like I apologise for any confusion or uncertainty around what he called the BoM’s ‘visual identity update’, saying that:

Archival tape – Dr Johnson

“Like any large organisation there are times when we don’t get it right…”

RICK:

But aside from that, Andrew Johnson kind of doubled down.

Archival tape – Senator David Pocock:

“You mentioned the Bureau, and I would like to ask a question on the name change.”

Archival tape – Dr Johnson:

“Can I correct you there? We are not changing our name. I'm not sure if you heard my statement, but we are not changing the name of the Bureau of Meteorology. All we are doing—just for the avoidance of any doubt—is—...”

Archival tape – Senator David Pocock:

“...to rebrand?”

Archival tape – Dr Johnson:

“We are not rebranding either.”

RICK:

He was asked questions by Senator David Pocock about whether or not he downplayed the links to climate change. And he denies this.

And he was actually asked by a couple senators including senator Peter Whish Wilson from the Greens about climate change.

Archival tape – Senator Whish Wilson:

“Are you a climate sceptic?”

Archival tape – Dr Johnson:

“I think my views on the changing climate are well known. They have been on the public record in this committee for many years… I think my record stands on its own senator thank you.”

RICK:

I mean, really, that whole Senate estimates thing - for a start, everything was delayed. That was only half an hour of questioning. So there just wasn't anywhere near enough time to get to the meat of this problem, which is that I'm hearing a lot of very different things from a lot of people who have no reason to speak to me, other than they are just so concerned about where the agency they love working for is headed.

RUBY:

Yeah. And Rick, I mean, this story, it began with the rebrands and then it became a story about an organisation, whose staff were increasingly unhappy and under pressure. And now we're hearing about inaccurate forecasts and even about the BoM potentially breaching its international obligations for weather data. So this seems to be a case of the more that you learn, the worse the picture gets. It increasingly is sounding like the BoM is an organisation in crisis.

RICK:

Yeah. Yeah... And I haven't even been able to write half the stuff that I’ve heard so far. But that's correct. The disconnection between what I'm hearing from the staff and from management is not just what you would expect from an organisation attempting to put its side of the story out there… What I'm hearing from the organisation is complete denial.
They've had internal updates for months saying, get ready for the new brand. Get ready for the new brand. Get ready for the new brand. Here’s the new uniforms, here’s the new font, here’s everything you need to know about the new brand, the rebrand.

And then suddenly the language changes because, hey, things got hot. That is not a sign of a healthy organisation. And knowing everything else that we know that I've been able to put out there in the public domain… it is just the tip of the iceberg.

RUBY:

Rick, thank you so much for your time and I’m hoping to hear more.

RICK:

There’ll be more.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Anthony Albanese has announced he will not be attending the UN Climate Change Conference, known as COP27, when it begins in Egypt next week.

The Prime Minister said he would miss the conference because he quote “cannot be everywhere at once”. The Morrison government drew fierce global criticism after attending COP26 with climate targets far below international standards.

And, five lions escaped their enclosure in Taronga Zoo yesterday in Sydney’s North Shore.

Guests who were staying overnight at the zoo were awoken by zookeepers telling them to abandon their belongings and run.

A spokesperson from the zoo said one of the lions needed to be tranquilised, but the other four calmly made their way back to their enclosure.

From Schwartz Media I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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