# Bureau of Meteorology

> website of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology

**Wikidata**: [Q114882717](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q114882717)  
**Source**: https://4ort.xyz/entity/bureau-of-meteorology-q114882717

## Summary
The Bureau of Meteorology website is the official digital presence of Australia's national weather, climate, and water agency, serving as the primary online gateway for meteorological information and services across the country. Maintained and published by the Bureau of Meteorology itself, the English-language site operates from Melbourne and provides comprehensive weather data, forecasts, and warnings to the Australian public and international users through its bom.gov.au domain.

## Key Facts
- **Primary URL**: http://www.bom.gov.au/ (access verified on 2022-10-28)
- **Language**: English exclusively
- **Geographic origin**: Australia
- **Publication city**: Melbourne
- **Maintaining entity**: Bureau of Meteorology
- **Publishing authority**: Bureau of Meteorology
- **Entity type**: Instance of a website (digital property class)
- **Wikidata sitelinks**: 158 interlanguage and project links
- **Official descriptors**: Known as "Bureau of Meteorology," "Australian Bureau of Meteorology," and referenced in context as "Australian Government, Bureau of Meteorology"
- **Content license**: Work available at URL with English language designation

## FAQs
**What is the Bureau of Meteorology website?**
The Bureau of Meteorology website is the official online platform for Australia's national meteorological service, providing weather forecasts, climate data, and hydrological information through a centralized portal managed directly by the Bureau from its Melbourne headquarters.

**Who runs and updates the Bureau of Meteorology website?**
The website is both published and maintained by the Bureau of Meteorology, meaning the same government agency responsible for collecting meteorological data also manages its digital distribution and online presence.

**Where is the Bureau of Meteorology website based?**
The website originates from Australia with Melbourne designated as its specific place of publication, reflecting the Bureau's operational headquarters location while serving a nationwide audience.

**How many languages does the Bureau of Meteorology website support?**
The website operates exclusively in English as its sole language of work and name, making it a unilingual resource for Australian and international English-speaking users seeking official weather information.

**What makes the Bureau of Meteorology website unique in government digital services?**
With 158 Wikidata sitelinks connecting it to other language Wikipedia versions and related projects, the site demonstrates exceptional interconnectivity and serves as a highly referenced authoritative source for Australian meteorological data across the global web.

## Why It Matters
The Bureau of Meteorology website functions as Australia's critical infrastructure for public access to life-saving weather information, climate monitoring, and water resource data. As a government-operated, single-authority platform, it eliminates fragmentation by consolidating national meteorological services into one authoritative digital source, ensuring consistency in emergency warnings, forecast models, and historical climate records. Its Melbourne-based operation centralizes data from across Australia's vast and environmentally diverse continent, translating complex atmospheric science into publicly accessible formats. The site's 158 Wikidata sitelinks indicate its role as a globally recognized reference point, connecting international audiences to verified Australian weather data. By maintaining direct control over both data collection and digital publication, the Bureau ensures information integrity, rapid updates during severe weather events, and standardized methodologies that support national policy decisions, agricultural planning, disaster response coordination, and scientific research. The website's exclusive English-language focus reflects Australia's primary linguistic landscape while serving as the definitive digital interface between government meteorological science and citizen access.

## Notable For
- **Self-contained authority**: Unlike many government websites that outsource digital operations, the Bureau of Meteorology both publishes and maintains its own web presence, ensuring direct control over data accuracy and timeliness.
- **Melbourne publication hub**: Operates from a single designated publication city while delivering nationwide coverage, demonstrating centralized digital governance for a continent-spanning service.
- **Exceptional web interconnectivity**: Features 158 Wikidata sitelinks, indicating extensive cross-referencing across Wikipedia languages and Wikimedia projects, far exceeding typical government website connectivity.
- **Unilingual precision**: Maintains exclusive English-language content without multilingual dilution, focusing resources on comprehensive coverage in Australia's primary official language.
- **Direct URL-to-entity mapping**: The bom.gov.au domain serves as both the website value and the work availability URL with identical qualifiers, creating a one-to-one digital identity.
- **Government entity transparency**: Clearly identified as an instance of "website" while explicitly naming "Australian Government, Bureau of Meteorology" among its aliases, leaving no ambiguity about its official status.

## Body

### Digital Identity and Classification
The Bureau of Meteorology website exists as a distinct digital entity classified as an instance of "website" in knowledge systems. Its formal title is "Bureau of Meteorology," though it carries aliases that contextualize its governmental nature: "Australian Bureau of Meteorology," "Australian Government, Bureau of Meteorology," and simply "Bureau of Meteorology." This multiplicity of names reflects both common usage and formal governmental designation. The website's Wikidata description explicitly frames it as "website of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology," distinguishing the digital platform from the operational agency itself.

### Technical Specifications and Access
The website operates through a single canonical URL: http://www.bom.gov.au/. This address serves dual purposes as both the primary website property and the designated location where the work is available. Access parameters were last verified on October 28, 2022, with English specified as the language of both the work and its name. The site maintains strict unilingual operation, offering content exclusively in English without additional language variants. Technical ownership is transparent: the publisher is listed as "Bureau of Meteorology" and the maintaining entity is identically "Bureau of Meteorology," creating a closed loop of governmental digital stewardship.

### Geographic and Administrative Context
The website's country of origin is Australia, with Melbourne specifically identified as its place of publication. This geographic designation aligns with the Bureau of Meteorology's physical headquarters while emphasizing that the digital service is formally published from this location despite serving a national and international audience. The "Australian Government, Bureau of Meteorology" alias explicitly ties the website to federal governmental structures, clarifying its authority and funding source.

### Content Distribution and Reach
The website's reach extends beyond its immediate domain through substantial integration with global knowledge systems. It maintains 158 sitelinks across Wikimedia projects, representing connections to Wikipedia articles in multiple languages and other reference platforms. This extensive linking network indicates that the Bureau of Meteorology website serves as a primary reference point for Australian meteorological information worldwide. The work_available_at_url property mirrors the primary website URL, reinforcing that all official content originates from the bom.gov.au domain rather than third-party platforms.

### Knowledge System Integration
Within structured data frameworks, the website is catalogued with precise properties that distinguish it from the Bureau of Meteorology organization. The instance_of: website classification separates the digital interface from the physical agency. Publisher and maintainer properties both point to the Bureau of Meteorology, documenting that the agency retains full lifecycle control over its web presence. Language and geographic qualifiers (P407: English, P813: 2022-10-28) provide temporal and linguistic context for data consumers. The 158 sitelink count quantifies the website's prominence as a referenced entity across multilingual Wikipedia versions and sister projects, making it one of the more extensively interlinked government websites in global knowledge bases.

### Operational Characteristics
The website functions as a self-sustaining digital property within Australia's governmental digital ecosystem. Its maintenance by the Bureau of Meteorology itself rather than a separate IT agency or contractor represents a distinct operational model. The Melbourne place_of_publication designation suggests formal registration and potential legal jurisdiction for digital publishing, even though web content is accessible globally. The site's English-only language_of_work_or_name property indicates a strategic decision to prioritize depth and accuracy in a single language rather than breadth across multiple languages, reflecting Australia's predominantly English-speaking population and the technical precision required for meteorological communication.