“I’m really coming in trying to be open and transparent about how we approach things, being open to saying when we’ve got things wrong,” he said.
“When you’re criticised and bashed regularly, it’s easy to get defensive, but I don’t think that’s helpful.”
The website disaster came after the bureau last year sent a false tsunami warning to half the country during a transition to new software. The message was marked as “test” but sparked alarm among many in NSW, Victoria and Queensland, and the agency was forced to apologise.
Minchin acknowledged another of the bureau’s public mistakes, when it asked people using popular phrase “the BoM” to switch to “the Bureau” in 2022, spurring another ministerial rebuke.
Then-environment minister Tanya Plibersek said at the time that the bureau’s focus “should be on weather, not branding”.
Minchin said it was an “incredible privilege” to lead the agency, which he refers to as “the BoM”.
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“There are few roles where your science can be immediately impactful to every person on their daily lives and their safety,” he said.
Minchin’s career began at the nation’s top science agency, the CSIRO, working in water management. He went on to lead the environmental division of Geoscience Australia, where he led the undersea search for MH370, the Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared over the Indian Ocean in 2014.
He then moved to become director-general of the Pacific Community, the principal scientific and technical organisation in the region.
An element of the openness Minchin said he will bring to the role is explaining the challenges the bureau will confront, including weather changes caused by global warming that creates more volatile weather systems.
“The climate science says that when there’s a change in the average climate, you get more extremes,” he said.
“We’re going to have to make use of new technologies and new innovations. AI [artificial intelligence], for example, is going to play a huge role in weather forecasting in the future.
“We have to use it very carefully because AI modelling is based in many cases on pattern recognition from the past. But in a changeable environment, where the weather is not always doing exactly what it did in the past, you can’t just plug in AI and hope for the best.”
Complaining about inaccurate forecasts is a national pastime, but Minchin said one of his priorities is communicating the bureau’s track record.
The agency’s statistics show the forecasted maximum temperature has improved by two days in the past decade, so the four-day prediction is now as accurate as a two-day outlook in 2015.
“I think a lot of the criticism that comes to the bureau at times is misunderstanding, or people not understanding the complexity of what we’re dealing with.”
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