IN his 28 years as a weatherman, from Antarctica to Far North Queensland Bill has experienced pretty much everything Mother Nature can throw at us. But big cyclones still scare him. Video: Isaac Egan

A big part of our work is providing weather forecasts for the aviation industry. We put up observation balloons from 52 stations around Australia. These are latex balloons full of hydrogen that eventually pop. We used to  calculate everything by slide rule, now the computer does most of the work.

I have four computer screens in front of me. The more knowledge we gather, the better we can predict what’s going to happen in the future, the quicker we can get warnings out to people. That’s the bottom line. Getting severe weather warnings out before thunderstorms, cyclones, flooding, saves lives. 

We get real time data from most stations every hour. At this time we’re carefully watching to see how the monsoon
trough develops. We’re running into another La Nina year, so we’re probably going to see above average cyclone activity. Part of our job is putting all the information into context. People still need to be very wary this cyclone season, we always say: be prepared, don’t wait to the last minute. Clean up your yards, get some tinned food, be prepared. 

We can sometimes get cyclones developing from a low into a category three within 24 hours. They’re all big storms, trees and power lines come down.  The winds we had during Yasi were comparable to a category one cyclone impacting Cairns, which was still scary enough. We had huge rain, 176mm in an hour the afternoon after causing lots of flooding.

We were evacuated before Yasi for the first time. Three of our team went to Brisbane, and the rest of us worked from home until the power went out. 

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