When Lyn Barnes wakes up in her sleepy town of Quilpie in south-west Queensland, she doesn’t know what weather conditions she’ll be facing that day.
The town is in the middle of a vast weather radar blackout zone stretching over 2,000 kilometres from between Warrego to Woomera in South Australia and Alice Springs.
The lack of radar means locals don’t get accurate weather data readings and are forced to rely on information from radars hundreds of kilometres away.
Weather apps are virtually useless.
“We have no idea what’s coming for us,” Ms Barnes said.
“I have people ringing me from Roma and in the east saying, ‘What’s going in Quilpie, can we expect rain?'”
Farmers in the region say the weather shadow is a safety issue for livestock, which need to be moved to higher ground in the event of heavy rainfall and flooding.
Last year, La Niña-driven storms battered outback Queensland, with heavy rain and flooding transforming dirt roads to slush and cutting off towns for months.
“So much of our work involves weather forecasts — the better the forecast you have, the better off you are to make good decisions,” Quilpie shire mayor and grazier Stuart Mackenzie said.
“We’ve had times where we’ve looked at other region forecasts and started shearing … and you suddenly get 30 millimetres of heavy rain.”
Multi-million-dollar weather forecast
Installing a radar, however, isn’t cheap.
The Quilpie Shire Council has taken the matter to the federal government and the Bureau of Meteorology, which said it would cost upwards of $20 million to install and operate a tower over its lifetime — an amount the outback council said was “outrageous”.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the BOM said it acknowledged requests for a radar and was “open to working with local and state governments to explore options for funding”.
“Decisions about where to place new observation equipment such as weather radars … are based on a number of factors relating to weather risks and associated impacts on cities, towns, industries and critical infrastructure,” the spokesperson said.
In November last year, a new dual-polarised Doppler weather radar was installed at Richmond in north-west Queensland, as part of a $77.2 million upgrade funded by the federal government.
New radars were also installed in Greenvale and Taroom, with a fourth radar being built near Toowoomba in the Darling Downs.
An existing radar in Moree in New South Wales was also relocated to provide increased coverage for southern Queensland.
Cr Mackenzie said graziers in the south west felt forgotten.
“We’ve been told [the government] needs to put the radar where it benefits the most people, which is why they put ones in east where there’s already a few,” he said.
“It would make a lot of sense to get a radar in the west, it doesn’t need to be in Quilpie, but it would give us an inkling of what’s coming.”
Guessing game
Ms Barnes said it wasn’t just graziers who were affected, with caravan travellers often caught out as well.
“[Travellers] don’t know when to get off the black soil or out of the creek bed where they are camping,” Ms Barnes said.
“It’s easy to think not many people live out here, but this is a big issue.”
Grazier Stephen Tully’s property is on the periphery of the Warrego radar and too far from the Longreach radar to get an accurate reading.
Structuring his workday on the sprawling sheep station involves a constant “guessing game”.
“If you don’t get the [weather forecast] right then there’s 10 people sitting around with nothing to do for a couple of days,” he said.
“It costs us money.”
Mr Tully said he believed the federal government had not taken much notice because “Quilpie is a long away from Canberra”.
“We don’t change our vote that much and they’d rather spend their money where it might suit them politically,” he said.
“But weather for us — it’s everything.”
The ABC contacted the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water but has not received a response.
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