Australian state wants to ban rain

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What's wrong with the biology of flies? many millions are spent each year on fly research and promoting Queensland to the rest of the world so aren't flies (or Queensland tourism) worthy of conversation

Yeah I think Steve Harvey was blasted by one of the southern US states for making a similar joke about hurricanes but he got his states mixed up and unecessarily labeled this state which never had hurricanes before in front an audience of millions on national TV

This thread demonstrates the problem with allowing all and sundry to comment on something about which they are basically ignorant From where I'm sitting, up here in the dry tropics North Queensland, the idea of changing the way weather up here is forecast makes perfect sense. There is, in fact, a genuine problem with current forecasting for this region. Allow me to explain...

I'm originally from the UK, and there, if rain was forecast, you could be pretty sure it would rain for considerable time and in between be cold and grey and miserable, so you planned accordingly.

Here, we don't get that kind of day-long drizzle. The rain here can be heavy but comes in rare, short bursts, which quickly clear and return us to heat and blue skies. Totally different kettle of fish, it's not really a problem at all.

Then occasionally we get a serious low pressure system or a cyclone come over which gives us a few days of very heavy rain - basically we get most of our yearly rain in one or two big events. This results in flooding, landslides and transport chaos, much as snowfalls do back in the UK.

The problem with the weather forecasting as it is at the moment is that it doesn't differentiate between these two types of weather system. We see a forecast of rain, and we prepare ourselves for tropical torrents, but most of the time all we get is a brief shower (if we're lucky - we're in drought). The problem is they forecast something like "sixty percent chance of rain" but they don't tell us whether to expect 0.1mm of rain or 100mm.

Weather forecasting here sucks big-time.

I've had two holidays on the gold coast where the weather forecast didn't warn me there would be torrential rain which basically ruined any chance of family outings

So having people in the Qld tourism sector try and cover up that you can have your holidays washed out is a little naughty and not in the interests of tourists like myself...

I tend to think it's not a cover-up, but BOM are just hopeless at forecasting tropical weather patterns

Got that right!