As mentioned earlier, climatological research was encouraged within the Bureau. Hunt continued his interest in the description of the various weather patterns which influenced Australia and in 1913 he published The Climate and Weather of Australia[41], in association with Griffith Taylor and E. T. Quayle. He also supported the independent efforts of his colleagues in the further study of this subject.

Quayle was very active in this area and wrote a number of papers in an attempt to establish some correlation between both the behaviour of the monsoon and/or the movement of cirrus clouds across Victoria on the extent of rainfall over that State (Quayle [67], [68]).

Whilst a great deal of this early climatological work has now largely been forgotten, it did lay the foundations for the research now being undertaken by the Bureau's National Climate Centre into the greenhouse effect and other indicators of climate change. It also made it absolutely necessary for the Bureau to exercise as strict a quality control system as possible over the observations network. This provided a strong basis for the current climate data base which is used for both information and research purposes.

Actual attempts to explore the upper air did not commence until 1913, when Griffith Taylor and Harold Power commenced work using the recently invented Dines meteorograph, attached to balloons flown from the Bureau's Central Office in Melbourne. This work continued sporadically until 1915, at least, and the results were published in 1916 (Taylor [72]).

Bureau of Meteorology