Bureau of Meteorology executives stared down an internal revolt from their own forecasters to create a “tailored” service for Woodside Energy’s shipping operation at its multibillion-dollar Scarborough gas facility on Western Australia’s Burrup Peninsula, insiders say.
The service was unusual in that the BoM’s internal commercial services team – which usually handles fee-for-service corporate requests – rejected the job due to a lack of staff. The commercial project was then handballed to the agency’s aviation division.
Although the Bureau of Meteorology has an aviation division forecaster looking after northern Western Australia, producing aerodrome forecasts for dozens and dozens of mine sites with fly-in fly-out workforces, Woodside’s dock in WA, where gas is loaded for transport to mostly foreign markets, has nothing to do with air travel.
“What we really hated – and we were really vehemently against it, and they just basically totally ignored us – was that they’ve also got us doing a warning service for Woodside petroleum where they load the ships with gas,” a senior meteorologist tells The Saturday Paper.
