Your Seasonal Forecast - API access

Your Seasonal Forecast takes output from the Bureau’s latest season climate model (ACCESS-S1), transforms it into a forecast for your specified locations, and delivers it as an application-ready data feed. After purchasing Your Seasonal Forecast, you will receive an email with a link to download instructions for using the product. The free Sample product provides access to the outputs of the system for three test locations (Boorowa, Narrogin and Toowoomba).  For the subscription product, the instructions include a spreadsheet template for providing your locations of interest. The user guide and api guidelines links below provide information on how to use the REST API to receive the JSON-formatted data streams.

The model output for rainfall is categorised according to terciles i.e three equal portions of the historic rainfall distribution. The data feed also contains information on the model spread i.e. how close together or far apart the model runs are from one another, as well as the overall confidence of the forecast (based on model accuracy) for the time of year that the forecast has been produced.

Visualisation example

The example visualisation above depicts a three-month rainfall forecast for Boorowa. The same type of outlook could easily be produced for a one or two month forecast. That example visualisation can be produced using the data associated with the categorical seasonal climate forecast product (sign up for the free trial to access examples).  Annotations (labelled in red) can be derived from the information in the two 'datastreams' and the 'location' objects delivered through the Senaps platform.

1. The season to date information is given in the 'monthly_rain_to_date' datastream and provides both the summer cumulative rainfall (Dec-Mar) total and its corresponding tercile category (based on long-term data) as well as the  growing season cumulative totals (Apr-Nov). In this example, only April rainfall is reported.
2. These data are contained in 'categorised_forecast' datastream. It includes: i) 3 month rainfall forecast in terms of the category of the model output (e.g. 3 denotes a tercile 3 forecast),  ii) the rainfall amount that the forecast category is based on (tercile 3 for the May-Jul period lies between 78 to 167 mm) and, iii) the percentage of model ensembles within each tercile category.
3. These data are provided within the metadata associated with the location. The skill category (low, medium and high) are provided alongside a % correct or % false alarm values for each month of the year.

Note: the visualisation above is not part of the product.

Further details on the product can be found in the following documents:

• Your Seasonal Forecast User Guide
• Your Seasonal Forecast API guidelines