The Bureau of Meteorology is continuing to monitor Tropical Cyclone Niran, which continues to move away from the north Queensland Coast.
Our meteorologists are using a broad range of tools to track and monitor the cyclone's movements and its impact on communities.
The Townsville radar located at Herveys Range is again operational.
During the outage the Townsville community continued to receive radar coverage from the Bureau's Cairns and Bowen radars. Users of the BoM weather app would not have experienced any interruption to their radar coverage.
Radars are not used to forecast the formation, strength or movement of tropical cyclones. The outage in Townsville had no impact whatsoever on the accuracy or frequency of the Bureau's cyclone forecast or warnings.
Radars are very complex machines that run 24/7 and, from time to time, can experience an outage that can take time to repair.
The Bureau runs a routine six-monthly maintenance schedule for each of its radars.
Radars in North Queensland are always serviced ahead of the summer cyclone season – the Townsville radar was serviced in October 2020 and will have its next service in April 2021.
In addition to its radars, the Bureau has other tools the community can use to monitor the weather – including the satellite viewer on the Bureau website at http://satview.bom.gov.au/ as well as graphical weather service MetEye.
The latest information about TC Niran and its likely impacts is available at http://www.bom.gov.au/cyclone/
