International Symposium on Antarctic Meteorology (continued)

The initiative of the US in maintaining a Weather Central deserves due acknowledgement, as does the contributions of Argentina in seconding Arrivz, Australia in attaching Keith Morley, France in providing Jean Alt, South Africa in seconding Van Loon, USSR in allocating Atapenko and New Zealand and others providing staff to work at Little America with Tom Gray and his team at Weather Central.

The initiative and energy of the Bureau in staging the symposium on Antarctic meteorology made a substantial contribution to the success of the IGY. While many other disciplines regarded the IGY as a period for collection of data for later research the meteorologists had an operational task of providing forecasts in the Antarctic and the forecasters took the opportunity to conduct research in their off-duty time. Thus the preliminary results of their research were available for presentation at the symposium. We in Australia had been actively engaged in research into Southern Ocean meteorology since the establishment of the Australian bases at Heard and Macquarie islands in 1948 and were well prepared to make significant contributions.

The question of territorial rights of various nations to their sovereignty over assorted slices of the Antarctic continent undoubtedly contributed to the operation of bases on the continent after the IGY. The signing of the Antarctic Treaty in 1960 postponed the resolution of the question of national sovereignty in the Antarctic. An important argument for the maintenance of the Antarctic bases was the initiative of the WMO World Weather Watch in response to the UN General Assembly request for peaceful uses of meteorology in outer space. This was an important non-territorial consideration for the operation of the bases after the IGY.

Bureau of Meteorology