For reasons unknown, the work needed to complete and publish the report was never undertaken. No copy was kept on Bureau files, however, a copy found in the estate of a deceased former Bureau officer was returned to the Bureau by his widow. It was subsequently placed in the Head Office Library and rediscovered in 1991 by John Cornall-Reilly of the Melbourne Frosterley Club during a search for material on the history of the RAAF Meteorological Service.

Investigations by Bill Gibbs of files held in archives show that the draft report was lent, in 1949, to D. P. Mellor, whose work Australia in the War of 1939–1945, Series Four (Civil), published by the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, in 1958, contains a chapter on Australia's wartime meteorological activities. It is known that Mellor's work influenced that of Joyce (Metarch Papers No. 5) because Joyce quotes from it. Thus it can be reasonably assumed that the report compiled by Haldane influenced the two already published histories of the RAAF Meteorological Service.

It has not been possible for Ian Forrest and I to verify all the accounts in the manuscript, so we decided to publish it with only editorial corrections, some minor changes to wording to make the meaning clear to a present day reader and the movement of the lists of the reports prepared by the Service to Appendix 1. Also, the pictures and captions are different, in many instances, to those included in the manuscript and detail of Meteorological Charters' Courses Nos 30 and 31 has been added to the list at the end of Chapter 8. We took the liberty of changing the dates on the manuscript, given as from July 1940 to August 1946, to now read April 1941 to July 1946, to reflect the period of the formal existence of the RAAF Meteorological Service. However, it is worth noting that in July 1940, in accordance with a decision taken in 1939 that if war eventuated, the meteorological service was transferred from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Air where it operated as the Directorate of Meteorological Services, and that some former civilian meteorological personnel were in uniform prior to the establishment of the RAAF Meteorological Service in April 1941. Also, the manuscript refers to two Squadron Leaders J. Hogan without distinguishing between them except by the work which they undertook. For the present day reader we have identified one as J. (Doc) Hogan, an OIC of Port Moresby and the officer responsible for developing the meteorological service for the Perth-Colombo flights who later became Regional Director, South Australia, and John Hogan (1896–1970) who was in charge of training for much of the war, later becoming Regional Director, New South Wales, and whose memoirs are published in Metarch Papers No. 2.

Bureau of Meteorology