Instruments and Observations

An important initiative during his period as Director of Meteorology was to ask senior staff in Central Office and Divisional Offices to identify where the most important action was required to fill the gaps. Almost all responses identified the Indian and Southern Oceans as the area where more observations were most urgently needed. Later paragraphs describe the efforts aimed at satisfying these needs.

The main activity in securing data from the Southern and Indian Oceans was the use of observations from passenger and cargo ships and other vessels on whaling or exploratory expeditions. In the nineteenth century, Maury's efforts to initiate international cooperation in collecting information from such vessels had resulted in a mass of information on ocean currents and other oceanographic and meteorological data which he used to propose preferred routes for sailing vessels. This initiative was soon put to practical use by ship's captains with considerable reductions in sailing time.

With the advent of wireless telegraphy, meteorologists soon realised the potential value of reports in preparing forecasts and warnings, particularly with regard to tropical cyclones. From the 1930s IMO (and later WMO) encouraged the use of ships' reports for both climatological and forecast and warning purposes. Australia's geographical isolation made ships' reports particularly valuable and Bureau staff regularly visited ships in local ports to encourage ships' officers to make observations and transmit them to the Bureau by wireless.

In the Dwyer years the Bureau appointed three ex-mariners as Port Meteorological Agents. Based in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, they briefed and educated ships' officers as part of a world-wide WMO scheme for making meteorological and oceanographic observations over the world's oceans, transmitting them by wireless to meteorological offices and recording them for storage in a world-wide data bank.

Len Dwyer was anxious to keep abreast of all developments in meteorological instrumentation and observations, having explored this subject in some detail during an overseas visit in 1954. He instructed those of us on official overseas visits to learn all we could of such developments and arranged for Bill Brann to make a special study of developments in the US and UK in July and August 1957.

Bureau of Meteorology