The full cost of the Bureau of Meteorology’s website overhaul was approximately $86m, Guardian Australia can reveal, after years of delays and millions in cost blowouts.

BoM apologised this week for the handling of the launch of the new website – its first redesign in a decade. It promised to make changes after the environment minister, Murray Watt, said the website was “not meeting many users’ expectations”, and the federal opposition said it had affected the ability of Queenslanders to prepare for recent rains. On Friday, the BoM reverted to the former colour scheme on the radar and weather map to match the old website in response to backlash.

The public-facing aspect of the site, which cost $4.1m on its own, was the tail end of an almost decade-long IT overhaul known as Robust, whic

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