Evaluating the Service

The Training Section of the Weather Bureau met the challenge of the war very effectively, and was most fortunate in its instructors, as I have already noted. The proliferation of both RAAF stations and their weather offices created an urgent demand for trained staff. Joyce, in Metarch Papers No 5, provides a list of forecasting officers at 1 January 1945 from which I can distinguish some omissions, but the count must have been about 190, most of whom would have been wartime personnel.

So far as I could judge, there were adequate supplies of specialised equipment. The instruments we were trained to use were all available in the meteorological sections in which I worked in Australia and New Guinea, except when I was for several months in 1944 a lone mobile forecaster along the northern coast of New Guinea. Of course I was never quite alone because my American counterparts were generous with their facilities; I had been trained speedily but effectively; and although Neil McRae presented me with a great challenge at the time, he also said he was confident I could accomplish the task. In the fully staffed sections there was some development of new instruments, the particular example being the introduction of radiosonde equipment in 1943. Shortly after hostilities ceased, some radar aids were developed for identifying wind direction and speed in upper levels of the atmosphere under most weather conditions. I had no experience of this, but one of the last tasks my radar officer brother David performed before his discharge was to install the specialised equipment at strategic locations around Australia.

Bureau of Meteorology