Weather and Climate (1991) 11: 27-30

1990 PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS

WINDS OF CHANGE

1990 has been a year for New Zealanders to look back at where we have come from,to assess where we are now, and to think about the future. Parts of our Conference havebeen devoted to that theme. Since I have been nearly 40 years in meteorology I thoughtit appropriate that I should do the same in this 1990 presidential address. Speakers atthe Conference have already covered this ground so I shall try not to repeat what theyhave said, my view wi l l be a personal retrospective, concentrating on the style ofmeteorology over the years rather than the substance.

If this address must have a title, I wouldcall i t 'Winds of change' because throughoutthe period of my involvement meteorology inNew Zealand has been in a constant state offlux and growth. Change and growth will alsobe the pattern for the future, of that I am sure.

There are meteorologists in the Society whopredate m y involvement b y many years.Many of them are much better qualified that Iam to talk about the changes and if I miss outevents which they consider important, then Iapologise to them. I stress that this i s apersonal view only and is not meant to be ahistory.

Can I make it clear that I don't necessarilyconsider that the old days were the good olddays. There was a lot of fun but there was alsoa lot of time and talent which were not fullyused. The Chinese have a saying (or i t mayhave been Bismarck, o r Lord Chesterfield,who between them seem to have said almosteverything worth saying) that there are twokinds of fool; those who believe that becausesomething is new i t is good, and those whothink that because something is old that i t isgood. The truth, as usual, l ies somewherebetween these two extremes. I hope I amneither kind of fool. I am excited by newdevelopments in meteorology and hope that Ican play an active part for a little time yet.

Not all change is improvement, of course.One o f the bits o f meteorological t r iv ia Itreasure is the fact that in the early years ofthis century the US Weather Bureau, with allthe then limitations on its skills and know-

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ledge, was able to prepare forecasts eachmorning and post them out to farmers in therural areas of the continental United Statesfor delivery the same afternoon. Just imaginethe consequences of postal delivery of weath-er forecasts in New Zealand today, even withFastpost!

When I joined the Meteorological Service in1951 New Zealand was still in the grip of post-war austerity. Imported goods were in veryshort supply. I was issued with a pencil (ballpoint pens were not yet invented) and in-formed that I would have to produce the stubwhen I required a replacement! As for rub-bers, they were like gold and were never leftlying around.

One thing the Service was rich in was peo-ple, or human resources as they are knowntoday. The Service had expanded enormouslyduring the war and most of those recruits hadreturned to the Met. Service for their peace-time careers.

One consequence of this richness of staffand workloads which by today's standardswere very light indeed was that diversion wasoften sought. In the Wigram Office, on a frostywinter's morning, this usually took the form ofOffice football. When I say Office football Imean it was played inside the office, a roomnot much bigger than the average kitchen, bysix to eight players. Inevitably, there wasconsiderable body contact, and minor injurywas common. Barograph records o f thosedays show quite clearly that there was alsofrequent contact between the ball and that

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particular instrument which stood on a shelfbeside one of the doors which did duty as agoal mouth.

The office summer sport was the card game500 which usually started at morning tea timeand continued until i t was time to go home.Again there would be at least six players, withthe participants changing as shifts changed or,occasionally, when a forecaster would dashout to do a forecast or analyse a map. A reallygood forecaster could do one of these taskswhile someone else was dealing a hand butonly the very best could do both in that time.Actually, I 'm exaggerating there because inmost cases the duty forecaster would continueto devote himself to his work.

When the forecast office shifted across toChristchurch Airpor t i n ear ly 1953 thesesports stopped. The office became much morepublic and the workload began to increase.

It was just as well that there were plenty ofstaff because the forecasting service was to-tally decentralised a t that t ime wi th f ivemainly aviation forecasting offices scatteredthroughout the country and a General Fore-casting Office at Kelburn. Communication be-tween the offices was almost non-existent.Toll calls were for emergencies only. Obser-vations and administrative messages were ex-changed b y teleprinter b u t l i t t l e i f anyforecasting guidance was given f rom theGFO. There was no technology f o r charttransmission so analyses plotted from codedversions were used. Since these usually con-tained crossed isobars and other aberrationsthey were not always regarded in the prov-inces with the respect they no doubt deserved.

'Forecast liaison' consisted of listening tothe forecasts on national radio and trying tocopy down the text. On the basis of that, localforecasts for radio were issued. There was noliaison a t a l l between aviation forecasterswith the result that a pilot flying the length ofthe country in his DC3 might get three quitedifferent versions of en-route weather. Eachoffice believed, o f course, that its productswere infinitely superior to forecasts from an-other office and complaints from pilots aboutdifferences were usually explained away byrubbishing the other forecaster's work. I t is awonder that the Service had any credibility atall among pilots.

However, pilots continued to call into theMet. Offices and contact with them was al-ways rewarding. I think most forecasters who

Winds of Change

have worked closely with aircrew hold fondmemories of the give and take that went on inthat association. A t the very least, one be-came aware of the consequences of wrongforecasts and this fired the wish to do better.

In those early days most upper wind infor-mation came from pilot balloon soundings,small hydrogen-filled balloons followed visu-ally by theodolite. There were ex-wartimeradars at Ohakea and Kelburn, of somewhatdoubtful reliability. This meant that whenthere was low cloud or rain, times when upperwind information was often critical, theremight not be any upper wind information atall. On clear anticyclonic occasions, however,observers up and down the country wouldproudly follow the balloons to 30 or 40 thou-sand feet (metres were only for foreigners,then) but to no great purpose since the fore-casters would already have decided that set-tled weather would continue.

One of the new generation of purpose-builtweather radars was installed at ChristchurchAirport in 1953 and proved its value, evenbefore acceptance, a t the end of the greatLondon to Christchurch A i r Race when in-bound aircraft were faced with the most ap-palling conditions of driving rain and poorvisibility. At last, technology was beginning toreally change the face of meteorology in NewZealand.

The installation of Mufax chart transmit-ters brought a new dimension to forecasting atthe branch offices. Suddenly, upper air charts,until then unknown except at Auckland andEelburn, became available and we were ableto look at developments in three dimensions.

Many advances in technology are simplymachines doing a conventional task in a moreefficient way. Not so satellite imagery, how-ever. For the first time we were able to lookdown on weather systems and see their struc-ture as a whole. The models of weather sys-tems which had been developed before thenwere largely ground based, supplemented byaircraft observations. No one had been able totake the sort o f overview now offered bysatellite imagery. This miracle of technologyis commonplace today but then was pure mag-ic and wonder. Actually, I 'm getting a b i tahead of the game because the first pictureswere oblique shots, with no rectification pos-sible, the receiving equipment, owned by theUS Navy Deep Freeze unit at Christchurch,was of rudimentary quality, and the pictures

Winds of Changesoon deteriorated due to an onboard fault sothat they looked like photographs of a distantoil slick taken through a venetian blind on arather foggy night.

Nevertheless, they were cherished and pa-tiently we learned to maximise the informa-tion we could get from them. As time went on,of course, quality improved, computer pro-cessing and enhancement evolved, and satel-lite imagery became the wonderful tool i t istoday. But think back to the time when notonly were there no pictures available, butthere had never been pictures!

One also has to wonder how we ever didwithout computer technology also. It has oftenbeen said that meteorology was a sciencewaiting for computers and I believe that to betrue. Richardson's lengthy (and wrong) calcu-lations in a hayloft in France in World War Iwere far ahead of their time. Today, computertechnology has been able to extend the rangeof forecasting from a day to several days, andthat is an advance which man alone could nothave achieved.

The Met. Service's first steps into numericalforecasting were crude but sure. Evan Wil-liamson laboured quietly (and incomprehensi-bly to many of us) on the first model. When itbecame operational midday data was punchedonto tape and then the tape was carried onfoot across to the University computer. Thecompleted charts usually came back about10.00pm, by which time all the forecasts forthe day were completed and forecasters werepacking up to go home. I must say there waslittle practical application in the first days.Now, however, models and machines haveimproved dramatically, the computer hasproved i t can draw better prognoses than ahuman, and computer products have becomeessential tools for forecasters. Let us givecredit to those pioneers in the field.

The development of computer technologyalso led to great changes in forecast roompractices. Whereas once all maps had to beplotted by hand, and many people becamehighly skilled at this, now this task could beperformed more quickly and accurately, evenif not so elegantly, by the machine. There wassome handwringing about the loss of tradition-al skills and in the UK, I believe, they keptmanual plotters on for some time in order tokeep the skill alive (in case the computerbroke down). I t did not take very long torealise that this was equivalent to Henry Ford

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employing wheelwrights and the practice wasquietly abandoned.

On an entirely different note something of acultural revolution took place in the Met.Service in the late 50s and early 60s with theemployment o f many Dutchmen f rom thewave of immigrants at that time. I don't knowhow many were taken on in the Met. Servicebut without exception in my experience theService was better off for them. Languagewas a l i t t le problem for a time. I t was aparticular problem for the wives who werenot forced to speak English at work and thereare a number of unrepeatable stories of theirstruggles wi th the idiom. Many shops i nChristchurch, and I've no doubt other places,tried to help with notices in their windows,'Dutch spoken here'. At the Christchurch Air-port Office the problem was a little different.There were so many Dutchmen that some-times almost all the staff on at a time wouldbe Dutch. We put a notice on our door, 'Eng-lish spoken here', to which one of the pilotsadded 'badly'.

Another quiet but deliberate revolution tookplace in the 170s as the operational work of theService was concentrated at Kelburn and theresearch base was expanded. This led to morescientists working in fields other than fore-casting and the sort of balance there is today.This balance benefits all the Service, I believe,but is far different from the structure I firstknew.

Another revolution which took place veryslowly was the development of meteorologicalexpertise outside the Service. Most of my talkhas concentrated on the Service, for two rea-sons. One, because that is where I worked,and, two, because there was little meteorologyelsewhere init ially. Acceptance o f outsidetraining and expertise was slow to come but isnow a fact of life and it is hard to imagine thatit could have been any other way.

I've probably talked too long about the past.What I have tried to indicate is that thestructure and practice of meteorology in NewZealand has always been changing and thepeople involved have not only been part ofthat change but have initiated it. The pace ofchange in the last two years or so may haveaccelerated but change itself is not new.

The future o f meteorology is, I believe,secure. Now, more than ever, meteorology isin the public eye. Recognition by politicians ofthe consequences of ozone depletion and cli-

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mate change and variability has never beenhigher and since the problems won't go awayon their own it's difficult to see them beingswept under the carpet. However, there wil lalways be other problems for politicians toconsider and some of these wi l l be of evengreater importance in the short term. Theywill compete for limited science funds andmay tend to squeeze meteorology out. I seethat the Society has a continuing role in moni-toring science funding and ensuring to the bestof its ability that fair shares are allocated tothe atmospheric sciences.

This year a very fundamental change tookplace in the structure of meteorology in NewZealand when the Meteorological Services Acteffectively disestablished the New ZealandMeteorological Service, without any reasonsor explanation given publicly. Although theresponsible Minister is required under the Actto ensure certain services continue, a l l ser-vices became contestable. The Society views

Winds of Change

this as a matter of grave concern since weconsider that there is a core of services whichmust be carried out by the state, for variousreasons, and the best way to ensure that theydo continue is through the re-establishment ofa state Meteorological Service. The Act hasthe potential to fragment the provision of allservices. This could lead to changes whichcould damage or destroy the fine organisationwhich has evolved over the past 150 years orso. The Society w i l l continue to press fo rchanges in this legislation.

Two things are sure about the future. One isthat people generally will continue to be fasci-nated by the weather and will always want totalk about it, the other is that people workingin meteorology will continue to find it a fasci-nating field to work in. No matter how far thefrontiers are pushed back there wil l still bemysteries, and rainbows, on the horizon.

Ray Smith