Letter to BOM

Dear BOM

You’ve made me sad. You took away my favourite plaything for months, gave it back to me for a brief moment on Friday, only to snatch it away again. I feel like a toddler who’s done some thing wrong, only I don’t know what it is.

You see, I love all things weather. Your app is my favourite. I subscribe to your blog. My homepage is your webpage. Your calendar hangs in my kitchen and I give it as gifts. I have a storm glass and Galileo thermometer on my desk. I’m always up for a chinwag about the weather.

In Canberra, a city of extremes, I check the temperature before walking out the door. How many layers do I need? But really, I can’t answer that question by temperature alone. I need the “feels like” temperature to really gauge the situation, and an up-to-date temperature.

But you took “feels like” away for my suburb and only update our weather every half hour.

Our temperature rises and falls like a roller coaster. This morning I woke to -3oC, but once the sun rose so did the temperature, rising into the positives in less than an hour. We’ll reach 14o today, but with wind chill what will it really be? Without “feels like” I won’t know.

For a maroon-blooded lizard transplanted to the coldest capital in Australia, I need to know.

Please give me back my “feels like” and update the weather regularly.

Sincerely
AJ

PS BOM is Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology

10 comments on “Letter to BOM

  1. Giggling Fattie

    June 8, 2020 at 9:28 pm

    That is a HORRIBLE thing to do! My weather app has the feels like all the time! I hope you actually sent this to them!

    • I know, right! When it disappeared originally, I thought it was a fault and messaged them but never heard back.

  2. I like the ‘feels like’ too. For instance, it’s 63 here in Laguna Hills right now (California) and ‘feels like’–63! Light jacket only.

    • At the moment it is 8.9’C here – but it could feel like 6 or -1, you just don’t know. Grrr Envy you the mild weather, Jacqui.

  3. If that happened to me, I’d be livid. I have all kinds of weather apps on my phone, just in case something like that happens. I think you have Accuweather in Australia, try that one.

    • Yeah, we do. I did have it, but have now put WeatherZone on instead. But they all access their data from BOM anyway, so it doesn’t help all that much (plus the ads are annoying on WeatherZone). I can’t believe they’d pull the most meaningful bit of data they can provide!

      So glad to know I am not the only one who appreciates “feels like”.

  4. Bummer. I wonder why they made the change. Hopefully there’s another app that can do something similar if you don’t get your feels like back.

    • I have tried other apps, but I really like BOM the best – but with “feels like”!

  5. Goodness, I never knew you were such a BOM fan! I just look up the temperature on line and, of course, there is a weather app on my phone. I’m pretty sure I’ve read a “feels like” recently.

    By the way, it’s 2 degrees this morning in Melbourne. I thought THAT was bad!

    • I’m not sure what they have done with “feels like” elsewhere, but here they seem to have taken it away from all suburbs except the three main centres of Canberra. Trouble is, we vary so much in temperature because of the hills!

      Until this morning we’ve had heavy frost everyday for a week. It has been pretty chilly. This morning was just above freezing, but we didn’t see sun so it felt bitterly cold anyway.

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