[1] After graduating from a high school in Mackay, Byrne was appointed as a junior weather observer at the Bureau of Meteorology.
[2] Byrne undertook more training in Melbourne and after receiving the relevant qualifications in 1971, he went from being a weather observer that collected and collated information to a fully-fledged forecaster.
[2] In his time with the Bureau he worked in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands and many regional centres, including Cairns, Mackay, Cloncurry, Brisbane, Townsville and some time in Mount Isa before finally settling in Yeppoon in 1986 where he made numerous appearances on RTQ7's local news, being regularly interviewed about storms and for other weather-related stories.
Byrne had already declined an offer from news director Phil Smith to fill in for the regular RTQ7 weather presenter while they were on holidays.
Some months later, new news director Alastair Frew extended another invitation to Byrne to join the station as their permanent weather presenter.
This meant Byrne now had to leave his Yeppoon home at 2:45am each morning to start his shift in Rockhampton, and then drive back to Yeppoon after work for some sleep before driving back up to the WIN Television studio in North Rockhampton to begin recording his weather reports for the various news bulletins.
[3] Additionally, Byrne also began presenting a statewide weather report upon the introduction of the Queensland edition of WIN Late News in 2001.
[12] Since late 2012, Byrne has presented a weekly retrospective segment called Rewind which airs on all local editions of Seven News across regional Queensland.