Chapter 3: The RAAF Measures Upper Air Temperatures (continued)

Barkley managed to get a grant to do a month's trial of the use of aircraft at a number of places to measure upper air temperature and humidity. Contracts were granted to civilian fliers who were supplied with instruments but the results were far from satisfactory.

When the meteorological flights were operating I was studying the literature relating to upper air soundings. Barkley was very helpful. Treloar was a bit stand-offish about the meteorological flight in those days. One item of interest was the form used for plotting upper air temperature and humidity called a T-phi gram. Later US meteorologists used an alternative called a Rossby diagram, which I think emanated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Barkley had a lot of these printed and the results were plotted every day. They were bound in a big thick book.

We leamt about meteorology from people like Barkley and by reading what little literature was available on the subject. Before 1937 there was no formal meteorological training in the Bureau of Meteorology or at any of the Australian universities.

Bureau of Meteorology