Residents who tipped as much as 110mm from their rain gauges yesterday morning couldn’t fathom how the bureau could be so off course.

Local browsers of its website scratched their heads when calling up “February 2010 daily weather observations” for Dubbo or reading of them in the Daily Liberal.

The website reported 3.2mm of rain fell on Saturday, 1.4mm on Sunday and 0.6 yesterday, as recorded by Dubbo airport’s automatic rain gauge that had been previously earmarked for inspection.

Initial contact with the bureau yesterday led a spokesperson to suggest that it was “not unusual” for rain to hit one spot and not the other.

The gauge at the airport was doing its job, she said, before dismissing the idea of shifting it closer to the centre of the city.

But by early afternoon her words had been discounted by a more informed colleague who revealed that weekend weather had prevented checking of the airport gauge that was “probably partly blocked”.

It would be fixed “as soon as possible”, he added, and the inaccurate figures removed from the website.

Using the bureau’s “stations database”, the second spokesperson said a complaint about the gauge had been recorded on Friday, but action to rectify any problem had been thwarted on both Friday and Saturday by wet conditions.

The “tipping bucket” rain gauge at the airport, that registers every 0.2mm collected, most probably was not providing accurate readings because of a blockage, perhaps caused by dust, he said.

Residents living across Dubbo yesterday told this newspaper of collecting from 35mm to 110mm of rain at the weekend.

David Geering eventually wrote in yesterday to ask “is the weather station at the airport broken?”.

“Only several hundred metres away from this weather station we had 138mm up to 9am Saturday and a total of 163 in this last rainfall event.

“Since Christmas we have had 390mm,” he reported in an email.

Meanwhile the bureau is hoping to gain a better official picture of the rain in Dubbo across the past few days through “volunteers” in Darling Street.

However, the last monthly report received by the bureau from the local weather watchers was in October 2009.