ADP, EDP and Computers (continued)

My notes reveal that a letter dated 27 June 1961 from the chairman. Interdepartmental Committee on ADP to the Chairman ADP Policy Committee identified the Bureau as one of three Commonwealth organisations with large scale requirements for a scientific computer. Gerry O'Mahony had represented the Bureau at meetings of the Interdepartmental Committee but it was not until November 1962, after Len Dwyer's death, that the Public Service Board gave approval for the creation of an ADP Section in the Bureau which Gerry O'Mahony was to head.

A brief word on the early development of NWP is appropriate here. In my Presidential address to the Applied Mathematics Section of ANZAAS in Sydney in August 1972 (published by AGPS for the Bureau in that year) I pointed out that in 1904 Vilhelm Bjerknes had stated that " . . . it is apparent that the necessary and sufficient conditions for the rational solution of forecasting problems are the following:

1. a sufficiently accurate knowledge of the state of the atmosphere at the initial time; and


2. a sufficiently accurate knowledge of the laws according to which one state of the atmosphere develops into another".

The requirements of item 1 of the Bjerknes statement were not to be achieved until some years after the advent of the meteorological satellite in 1960 because this remote-sensing device was needed to secure the necessary density of observations over data sparse areas, particularly those in the southern hemisphere.

Bureau of Meteorology