Investigations into Tropical Meteorology (continued)

When I completed my MSc thesis in 1942, I submitted a brief paper on the subject of the gradient wind in low latitudes to the Linnean Society of New South Wales. In our training course, considerable attention had been paid to derivation of the wind field at 1000 m from the pressure pattern at mean sea level. A nomogram was used to determine wind speed from pressure gradient. Wind direction at that level was assumed to be at right angles to the gradient so that if one faced into the wind in the southern hemisphere, higher pressure would be on one's right.

One aspect which was not mentioned on our training course was that if geostrophic conditions applied at the equator, any pressure gradient should produce a wind of infinite speed. Although the questions raised in my paper were interesting, my technique in seeking answers to the questions was somewhat primitive. However the paper did illustrate how inadequate at that time was the textbook treatment of the pressure gradient—wind flow relationship in equatorial latitudes.

Viewed from the standpoint of our present (1994) knowledge of meteorological processes, the Bureau publication (Gibbs, 1943) and my paper submitted to the Linnean Society seem embarrassingly amateurish. It should be remembered that at that time there was little academic interest in meteorology in Australia. Textbooks and published papers regarded air-mass and frontal analysis as the principal tools of synoptic analysis. There was little, if any, information on the subject of tropical meteorology. The only observations of the atmosphere consisted of surface observations and a restricted network of pilot-balloon observations of upper wind.

Bureau of Meteorology