Most of us might already be familiar with the Chance of above median tool from the Bureau, or at least have seen it featured in farm journals, webinars or Landline (Figure 5). This tool tells us if we can expect above or below median rainfall, for a selected period of time.
However, the Bureau’s five FWFA tools provided us with an opportunity for more context than simply ‘above’ or ‘below’ the median, which now understand to be a simple binomial result. The Bureau’s climate outlook and forecasting tools provide additional context to forecasts by including the decile distribution of forecast model runs and the likelihood of them occurring, based on 99 model runs over weeks, fortnights and months. So essentially the FWFA tools can be described as short-term climate forecasts. They are not as accurate as a seven-day weather forecast, but they give us a better understanding of the climate outlook over a shorter time frame (one week to three months). The tools provide insight by presenting the range of forecasted outcomes in multiple ways and can help you plan operations past the seven-day weather forecast. Using the FWFA tools in combination with seven-day weather forecasts provides more confidence in interpreting and using the information to make decisions.
There are two types of tools: maps and location-specific graphs. Clicking on a location on a map or entering the location in the search function will bring up the location-specific graphs.
In this chapter, we present the five tools and show how you can use them to gain insight into the chance of an extreme weather event occurring.
Figure 5. An example of the Chance of above median tool from the Bureau for a three-month outlook (September-November), issued at 25 August 2022. Reproduced from Agriculture Victoria’s eLearning course ‘Using seasonal climate prediction tools’.