In fact, bureau director Rob Vertessy points out that there is a lot more to the bureau than just the weather.

"Our name is all about weather, isn't it? And it has been for a hundred years and it's one of those sacred objects that will never change. But the truth of the matter is we have really broadened our remit. The range of things we look at now is extensive, and it's going to get broader and broader in the future.'' he said."

Dr Vertessy, a catchment hydrologist, moved to the bureau in 2007, after 20 years working for the CSIRO at Black Mountain, to set up the bureau's new water information division at the height of one of the country's worst droughts.

When he became director of the agency last September, he made the decision not to transfer to the headquarters in Melbourne as he believed the role would be far better filled from Canberra.

"The chief reason is the bureau sits on a remarkable amount of environmental intelligence, and Commonwealth department agencies are very, very significant potential beneficiaries of that information," he said.

"I can be far more effective being here in Canberra having those conversations with senior officials across the Australian government portfolio."

He said there are managerial advantages in being close to department secretaries and ministers, but also conceded that there was a strong personal pull to remain in the capital.

"I love this town. The lifestyle here is great, and professionally it's awesome, too,'' he said.

''You've got so many fantastic institutions populated by top-notch professionals. The kinds of technical conversations you can have - anything from public administration at one end through to deep science with our colleagues over the road here at CSIRO - it's unparalleled. Hands down, it's the best place for a director of meteorology."

The bureau's Canberra office is home to a large part of the water division, which employs more than 130 specialists to analyse water systems and flows across the country. It also hosts the product development team, which builds new systems to improve access to the bureau's enormous wealth of data.

Ahead of a Canberra Centenary weather event on Saturday, Dr Vertessy said the bureau was slowly getting better at raising its profile in the community, particularly when it came to communicating the huge array of work done by the agency beyond providing daily and weekly weather forecasts.

"People are gradually coming to know of us as really what we are, and that's a broad-based environmental intelligence agency," he said.

"That is really our core competency - explaining how the Earth as a dynamic biophysical system operates … That in the end is our DNA - it's enabling citizens or businesses or governments to make decisions on how to live on the dynamic Earth."

Over the past few decades, huge advances in technology have made the bureau's work both easier and more challenging, improving accuracy but also increasing the amount of data available - from climate, to water systems, and even into phenomena happening in space.

Ultimately, almost 10 per cent of Australia's gross domestic product was weather-sensitive, Dr Vertessy said. This provided a sense of the importance of the bureau's work, and made talking about the weather a nationally significant conversation, particularly between government agencies in Canberra.

"An accurate forecast delivered timely can make actually quite a bit of economic difference to the nation," he said. "People should be thinking about [the weather]."

■ Canberra and the bureau - together for 100 years, Saturday from 9am to 3pm at the Shine Dome, Gordon Street, Acton.