Data Attribution & Licensing
Flood Sentinel sources environmental observations from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM). This page details the licensing, attribution requirements, and our obligations as a data redistributor.
Bureau of Meteorology — primary source
Rain and river observations served by Flood Sentinel come from BoM's Flood Warning Network: rainfall and river-height stations operated by BoM and contributing State and local agencies whose data is collected and published by BoM under the Water Regulations 2008.
We pull this data via BoM's public anonymous FTP (HCS files at
ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/gen/fwo/, the
659xx product range) and via BoM Water Data Online
(bom.gov.au/waterdata/services). Both are free,
legislated public data feeds.
Licence: Most BoM observations are made available under Creative Commons Attribution Australia 4.0 (CC BY 4.0 AU). Some products are released under different terms; the authoritative description is BoM's own Rain and River Licensing Statement.
Required attribution
Whenever BoM-sourced observations are displayed on our service or delivered via our API, we attribute as follows:
Data sourced from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Australia. © Commonwealth of Australia (Bureau of Meteorology).
If you redistribute or display BoM data obtained through our API,
you are required by the licence to carry equivalent attribution. Our
JSON responses include an attribution field for this
purpose.
Derived products (forecasts)
Flood Sentinel's machine-learning forecasts, threshold breach alerts, and uncertainty bands are derived products built on top of the source observations. The derived works themselves are © Flood Sentinel; subscribers may use them per the Terms of Service.
We are not affiliated with, nor endorsed by, the Bureau of Meteorology or any State Emergency Service. Nothing on this service should be represented as an official BoM warning.
Other data sources
- SILO Climate Database — gridded and station rainfall data from the Queensland Government, used for historical backfill where BoM coverage is sparse. SILO terms.
- BoM Climate Data Online (CDO) — supplementary long-record rainfall stations not in the Flood Warning Network. Same licence as Flood Warning Network data above.
- State agency telemetry via BoM — many FWN stations are operated by state agencies (WaterNSW, QLD DNRM, DWER WA, OEH NSW and others). Where their data reaches us through BoM it flows under the Water Regulations 2008 and the BoM licence above. Where we pull it directly from the agency, the source and its terms are listed in the next section.
Direct state and third-party feeds
These sources are polled by Flood Sentinel directly, not via the Bureau, and are stored with their own source tag so every reading's provenance is a query, not an estimate.
- WaterNSW — river levels and Warragamba storage from the WaterNSW real-time data service, used with attribution under WaterNSW's data terms. © WaterNSW.
- Victoria — Water Measurement Information System (DataVic) — river levels and rainfall for Victorian catchments, used under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 via DataVic. © State of Victoria (Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action).
- Queensland — Water Monitoring Information Portal (WMIP) — Contains data sourced from the Queensland Government (Water Monitoring Information Portal), used under CC BY 4.0. WMIP · CC BY 4.0.
- NSW — Manly Hydraulics Laboratory (MHL) — coastal and estuary tide and level observations collected by MHL for the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. NSW Government data, used with attribution; MHL publishes a data-request process rather than an open-data licence, and formal terms are in progress. mhl.nsw.gov.au.
- Open-Meteo — numerical weather prediction rainfall forecasts (ECMWF IFS, BoM ACCESS-G and other models) used as forward-rain features. Open-Meteo data is provided under CC BY 4.0.
Disclaimer
The Bureau of Meteorology and contributing agencies make data available without warranty. We pass that data through with the same disclaimer:
Data is provided “as is” without warranty of any kind. The Commonwealth of Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology, and the contributing State agencies disclaim all liability for any loss or damage arising from use of this data. Flood Sentinel makes no representations or warranties about the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of source data.