Dairy Forecast Service
Skills: Decision support and custom tools, Weather forecasting, Meteorology
Location: Australia
Date: 2008 – present
The Dairy Forecast Service (DFS) provides dairy operators with an alert of impending weather conditions that can lead to heat stress in dairy cows, reducing milk yields and in extreme conditions may even cause cow mortality. The service is operational from October to March every year and has seen subscription requests nearly double every year.
The DFS includes an Email and/or SMS alert function for a predefined alert threshold and custom variables that can be set by the subscriber.
Subscribers to the service provide the latitude and longitude of their dairy and the Dairy Forecast Service
provides a weather forecast and alerts service for their location.
The site-specific forecast service is available by subscription and provides a seven-day summary forecast, a seven-day hourly forecast, temperature humidity index (THI) graphs of the seven day period and national scale THI. The forecasts are accessed through the Dairy Forecast Service website.
A weekly outlook of the THI forecast is also provided to the Shepparton News for local distribution.
The Dairy Forecast Service is now being operated by Katestone’s subsidiary company Weather Intelligence.
Weather Intelligence also provides a similar heat load forecasting service to assist cattle feedlot operators: CHLT which was also developed by Katestone.