Automatic Weather Stations

The first issue of Weather News in August 1956 records the result of Bill Brann's efforts. It reports that the Bureau had placed an order with a French company for an AWS to be built to Bureau specifications for meteorological observing equipment, an electricity supply from a wind-generator charging a bank of batteries, and a wireless transmitter. The system was required to activate automatically to make and transmit observations on a regular basis. The specifications included a requirement for the equipment to operate unattended for one year, to withstand winds of 150 mph (240 kmph) and temperatures to -50°C.

By March 1957 the equipment had arrived in Australia and had been installed and tested at Port Phillip Heads, wireless messages having been successfully received by the DCA communications centre at Essendon Airport.

On 11 January 1958 the station was established on Lewis Islet, Davis Bay, Antarctica (66°S, 133°E). First reports from the station were received at Macquarie Island on 24 January and subsequent reports indicated that the equipment had withstood winds of 90 mph (145 kmph).

When an ANARE party visited the island in early 1959 it was found that strong winds had collapsed two of the aerial towers, although the wind generator had kept the batteries charged and the clock working. The towers were replaced and transmissions resumed, being picked up four times daily at Mawson. However it became obvious that the equipment was not robust enough to withstand the fierce blizzards of Antarctica when transmissions again ceased after a few months.

The work of Bill Brann and his engineers in procuring, testing and installing the equipment was magnificent and the experience gained with AWS at Lewis and Chick islands in the Antarctic was used to design, procure, test and install an AWS on Ashmore Island, in the Timor Sea, which operated successfully not long after the death of Len Dwyer in 1962.

The possibility of using moored ocean buoys containing AWS was also examined but it was concluded that the great expense of purchasing, mooring and servicing buoys which might be expected to perform reliably for long periods in the Southern Ocean was unlikely to be justified. Technology had not reached the stage where it was possible to deploy drifting buoys, the data from which could be collected via orbiting communication satellites. The Bureau was to acquire and deploy such drifting buoys some decades later.

Bureau of Meteorology