The weather bureau has warned against people describing natural disasters as "one-in-100-year events", saying the term was misleading.
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The Bureau of Meteorology's chief executive Andrew Johnson told a Senate inquiry into Australia's disaster resilience that while the phrase was often used to convey the severity of incidents like floods, it led to a false sense of security.
"Could this country please stop referring to weather events as one-in-100, one-in 1000, one-in-10,000? It confuses the community, it's very, very poorly understood," Dr Johnson told the inquiry.
"These are complex, statistical engineering constructs that mislead the community ... they're often used as a shorthand way of trying to communicate risk.
"They are technically very difficult for the average citizen to understand."
The head of the bureau said while the organisation had to walk a fine line with the levels of warnings to the public before natural disasters, Dr Johnson said the number of severe weather events would only increase.
"We have to get better as a nation. Everybody's involved in this situation, because it's not going to decrease, the risks and uncertainties are increasing in a changing climate," he said.
"We know that floods are going to happen more often, they're going to be large, we can do everything we can to provide as much advanced warning as possible."
Following severe flooding and storms in northern Australia, Dr Johnson said the bureau was undergoing "a lot of soul searching" on how the risk of weather events could be better communicated to the public.
He indicated unprecedented levels of natural disasters had made the job more difficult.
"There are new relationships emerging between the ocean, the atmosphere, the land, the ice, all the things that influence our weather ... the baseline in effect is changing," Dr Johnson said.
"Our numerical weather prediction systems training ... is adapting to those new realities.
"We are seeing things happen that, certainly since Federation, in the modern experience, we haven't seen in this country."
While the bureau was looking to upgrade its gauges and detection methods to be more accurate, Dr Johnson indicated replacing the entire network would take a long time.
"To do all the gauges, the literally hundreds and hundreds of gauges that need to be done, we sort of have to average two new ones every week for 10 years, it's a huge effort," he said.
Australian Associated Press
