International Activities (continued)

There is no doubt that various organs of the US Government had been exploring the possibility of reducing the risk of the use of outer space for military purposes and had considered the alternative of a meteorological satellite from the time of the launching of the Russian Sputnik in October 1957, the American Explorer 1 in January 1958 and the meteorological satellite Tiros 1 in April 1960.

The idea of a World Weather Watch had been proposed by Harry Wexler at the meetings of our Panel of Experts on Meteorological Satellites in Geneva in November 1959, Washington in March 1960 and Geneva in March 1962. Harry Wexler and Victor Bugaev were attached to the WMO Secretariat in Geneva to prepare a response to the United Nations request in Resolution 1721 (XVI) of December 1961 a reply of which was formally transmitted from the WMO to the UN in June 1962. Len had died a month before but my reports of the earlier meetings of the Panel of Experts had made him well aware of developments which were the subject of the discussions in the WMO Executive Committee of which he was a member. In considering the plan for a World Weather Watch it was decided that there should be three principal World Centres for the collection and processing of data and Len was aware of the need to prepare a submission to the Australian Government for a positive reply to a likely request that Australia should operate one of these three Centres.

It is interesting to observe that the international cooperation required for the collection and exchange of meteorological information which is essential for the effective operation of national meteorological services made meteorology an obvious area for the achievement of the objectives of UN Resolution 1721 (XVI).

The suitability of meteorology as an area of international cooperation was also useful in implementing the Antarctic Treaty signed on 1 December 1959. Len Dwyer attended a meeting of representatives of the 12 original signatories to the Treaty in Canberra in July 1961, when methods of implementation of the treaty were discussed. Cooperation of meteorologists in Antarctica during the International Geophysical Year in 1957–58 was an obvious demonstration of the ease of obtaining international cooperation between like-minded people.

Bureau of Meteorology