Additional $1.15 million spent on updating Bureau of Meteorology website after 2025 rebuild sparked outrage

Bureau of Meteorology’s boss Stuart Minchin has revealed an additional $1.15 million was spent on updating and amending the weather service’s website in late 2025 after an almost $100 million rebuild sparked outrage.

The chief executive officer provided an update on the saga during a Senate estimates hearing on Monday — admitting that while the website overhaul had “missed the boat” on a few points, BOM was “working hard” on addressing the issues.

“It’s met 80-90 per cent of its intended outcomes and it’s missed the boat on a few key user experiences for some parts of the community. We are working hard on addressing those,” Dr Minchin said.

“We’re continuing doing incremental improvements to the website, this was always budgeted. After a website release, there’s a need to adjust.

“Across November and December, incremental improvement has cost $1.15 million over that period.”

The overhaul to BOM website was widely unpopular when it was rolled out in October, with Australians taking to social media to complain the update was harder to navigate and the radar was more difficult to read.

Much of the outrage was directed at the staggering $96m cost of the project, after the bureau had originally claimed it was only $4.1m.

Dr Minchin had taken over at the helm of the bureau just three weeks after the new design was rolled out.

At a similar parliamentary hearing last year he defended the IT works and said there had been a misunderstanding about the total cost. He highlighted the almost $100m bill was actually for a broader program, called “Robust”.

Dr Minchin had urged the public not to misunderstand the size of the overhaul, which went well beyond a simple refresh of the website design to supercharged the IT systems that prop up Australia’s national weather agency.

It included the reconstruction of IT technology and installing a supercomputer to handle the vast amounts of data from observing network and weather models.

BOM’s chief information officer Nichole Brinsmead on Monday reminded Australians that the up kept spending on the website was planned as the bureau needed to enhance systems as new features and technology became available.

She insisted that the additional $1.15 million spent in late 2025 was a budgeted expense.

“We actually set aside money every year for ongoing improvements and feature releases for both the app and the website and we’ve done that for this financial year,” she said.

“We’ll continue to do that in future years as well.

“As new products and services come online, we will continue to invest and upgrade and enhance the website.”

Environment Minister Senator Murray Watt reminded Opposition Senators on Monday that the larger program of works had been first approved by the Turnbull government in 2017.