BAMOS June 2015

Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological& Oceanographic Society

Vol 28, No. 3, JUNE 2015 ISSN 1035-6576

AustralianMeteorological& OceanographicSocietyAMOS

Chasing Auroras

ARC Laureate Fellows - Glowing waters of Tasmania - Happy 30 years, CSIRO

ContentsEditorial ..........................................................................................................................................................................53President’s Column ........................................................................................................................................................54News ..............................................................................................................................................................................55News from the Centres ..................................................................................................................................................56Comment: Ocean and climate research has come a long way in 30 years ..................................................................60Special Feature: Lighting up the sky, and waters, of Tassie ..........................................................................................62On the front cover: Chasing Auroras ..............................................................................................................................64Meet a Member: Trevor McDougall ...............................................................................................................................67The Research Corner with Damien Irving: Workflow automation ................................................................................68Charts from the Past with Blair Trewin: 9 May 1980.....................................................................................................70

ISSN 1035-6576

Cover picture: The Aurora Australis, captured from Oatlands, Tasmania on 29 June 2013. See page 64 for a feature on the “Aurora Chasers”Image: Katinka Smith, http://katinkasmith.com.au and Instagram @katinka_smith

Unless specifically stated to the contrary, views expressed in the Bulletin are the personal views of the authors, and do not represent the views of the Society or any other organisation or institution to which the author(s) may be affiliated.

http://katinkasmith.com.au

Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol. 28 page 53

Editorial

From Hobart to BrisbaneWelcome to your June issue of BAMOS, in July. Yes, it’s the end of July. I do sincerely apologise for the lateness of this issue, but in lieu of tending to my regular BAMOS duties, I was fortunate enough to instead be preparing for and attending this month’s national conference in Brisbane. This was my first experience of an AMOS conference, and it was a great pleasure to meet some of you in the flesh, and impressive to see you in action.

The informal feedback on the conference so far is mostly positive (and insightful when it’s not). As one of the most significant events on the Society’s calendar, we will be taking a closer look at some of the programme highlights in the next issue of BAMOS.

Was there anything that you particularly enjoyed, or didn’t enjoy, about the conference? If so, please do feel free to drop me a line and tell me about it.

I personally really enjoyed the communication aspects of the programme. We heard from a varied range of professionals about their communication experiences including: researchers; those working directly with the community; journalists & editors; and science communicators themselves. I found this honed in nicely on the overall conference theme of communicating. Our President Todd elaborates on this in his column over on the next page.

With the communication sessions generally proving quite useful, I am looking forward to dissecting and exploring communication in the AMOS sciences further at future conferences.

I did also note that those who were looking forward to a bit of warmth in Brisbane were left disappointed. Just before the conference and during, things did get pretty interesting weather-wise as a cold snap moved across southeast Australia—on the last day, QLD even experienced record breaking snow falls!

The cold snap certainly was a talking point throughout its chilly presence. But I’ve always found that the general public and media interest in weather phenomena is quite high.

Weatherwatch has been around for a few years now, and is just one example of a community that thrives on weather events. AMOS has recently started sponsoring their meetings in Sydney, as detailed on page 58. I am looking forward to hearing more from them through future issues of BAMOS.

Also in this issue, we take a closer look at a place dear to my heart, Tasmania. I spent some time there just before heading to Brisbane (pic to the right). It felt like the cold travelled with me! We also meet some of the most

enthusiastic, friendly and talented Aurora chasers on the planet on pages 62–66.

Someone else who is enjoying a bit of travel is our Member of the Month, Trevor McDougall. He’s just won a prestigious Fellowship, along with Steve Sherwood. Both are Professors at UNSW. Find out more on pages 55 and 67.

And if you’re already feeling conference withdrawals, don’t despair! We are now not too far out from our AMOS 2016 conference, being held in Melbourne this coming 8–11 February. If you’re planning on presenting, please do keep an eye out for any emails on the deadlines as our organising committee is now well underway with preparations.

I hope you enjoy this issue of BAMOS—see you next month!

Melissa LyneEditor

A week too early: 11 July 2015, before the cold snap, my son and I tried desperately to find fresh snow at the top of Mt. Wellington in Hobart,

Tasmania.


President’s Column

Focus on communication Many of us are still catching our breath after the AMOS national conference in Brisbane. It was an outstanding event, with a large number of special sessions and activities in addition to regular scientific talks. I’d like to acknowledge and thank Andrew Wiebe and Michael Hewson for their efforts in leading its organisation, along with all of the members of the organising committee and volunteers who helped make the conference an enormous success.

‘Communicating our science: from research to operations to community’ was one theme of our national conference in Brisbane. This is certainly an important topic that cuts across almost all aspects of what we do as a Society and amongst our disciplines. It means different things to different people and is worth considering regardless of your particular role. Communication is something we do very well in some areas and something we need to work on in others.

How well do we communicate amongst ourselves?

For researchers, the earliest challenges might be giving those first few oral presentations with confidence. Then perhaps writing their first scientific paper, with the unambiguous and concise language our mentors demand. As careers progress the challenge might become writing your next proposal that embodies a clear and engaging narrative within the confines of an inflexible structure. All of these areas, which focus mostly on communicating to our peers, are essential for the working researcher. Arguably, they are skills most of us need to continue to refine throughout our careers.

Within our discipline, however, there is another area of critical importance: communication between researchers and those primarily focused on operational services. Although there are examples that exemplify excellence in communication between these areas, I feel this is something we could do better as a community. With the exception of organisational structures within the Bureau of Meteorology that focus on the transition from research to operations, there are few opportunities for the broader research and operational communities to engage effectively to encourage two-way exchange of information. AMOS is keen to facilitate this engagement, and we hope the national AMOS conference provided one forum to achieve this. AMOS also offers forums through our regional centres that facilitate more research—operational interactions.

How well do we communicate with the general public?

For the operational community, dissemination of relevant information to the public, emergency services, and decision makers is a critical part of the role. Whether it is

an operational forecaster speaking on live radio, creating routine guidance for the aviation sector, or disseminating the latest seasonal outlook, the ability to communicate accurately and concisely is critical. This is an area that I feel our community does very well.

Communicating about climate variability and climate change remains a significant challenge for our community. Many in our field have excelled for many years in their interactions with the media, government and general public with regards to climate science—though there are many aspects of climate science that are challenging to communicate because of their complexity or because they are not entirely understood. Of course, there are many areas that are controversial because of their political and economic implications—this makes public communication of our science much more challenging than some other fields of science.

For the above reasons communication has become a valued skill for people working in our AMOS disciplines. Communication, especially with the general public or media, is also an area some in our AMOS community would prefer to avoid, or find frightening. Some of this avoidance is related to lack of experience, where encouragement or training should assist. However, as with many fields of science we likely have a higher than average concentration of introverts among us. Despite current trends, we should be mindful of each individual’s talents and dispositions and avoid trying to force a square peg into a round hole. Susan Cain’s TED talk on “The power of introverts” is a thought provoking discussion on some of these issues.

For those of you fortunate enough to have attended the conference in Brisbane: I hope it inspired you to think about some of the above issues and continue to discuss them with your colleagues. AMOS 2015 certainly had an outstanding group of invited speakers who exemplified outstanding communication and, by all accounts, inspired many of the conference attendees.

On other AMOS matters: we are now calling for nominations for the prestigious AMOS awards for 2015. These include the Christopher Taylor Award, the Priestley Medal, and the new Distinguished Research Award. See here: www.amos.org.au/awards and follow the link to the updated award descriptions. Please note there are some changes to the eligibility and selection criteria compared to previous years, including a change in the age criterion for the Priestley medal. Please remember to nominate your deserving colleagues by the 1 September deadline.

Todd Lane

www.amos.org.au/awards


News

Australian Research Council Laureate FellowshipsCongratulations to AMOS members Professor Steve Sherwood and Professor Trevor McDougall who recently received Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Fellowships.

A total of 15 new Fellowships were awarded by the ARC at the end of June, with $42 million allocated for the next five years of projects.

Christopher Pyne, the Minister for Education, says the projects of the Fellows are able to deliver outcomes that benefit the nation, its economy and its people.

Professor Trevor McDougall (also an AMOS Fellow) is Scientia Professor of Ocean Physics in the Applied Mathematics department at The University of New South Wales. Prof. McDougall is internationally recognised for his expertise in the field of ocean mixing and how it is represented in climate models. His work on ocean physics is fundamental to understanding ocean circulation and the way the heat is transferred between the ocean and the atmosphere in the climate system.

Prof. McDougall’s Fellowship project is entitled ‘Ocean mixing processes and innovation in oceanographic models’. This aim of the project is to develop new oceanographic tools and thermodynamic variables to support a new generation of accurate ocean models more suitable for the prediction of changes in a warming world.

The ocean’s role in the climate system is predominantly to store and to transport heat and carbon dioxide, and the ocean’s ability to do this is sensitive to the strength of mixing processes, which are quite uncertain.

This project hopes to distinguish the vital role of vertical mixing from that of horizontal mixing by (i) developing algorithms to construct neutral density surfaces in climate models, (ii) formulating new inverse techniques to deduce the amount of vertical mixing in various ocean regions, and (iii) incorporating new approaches to ocean mixing processes and thermodynamics into ocean models.

Professor Steve Sherwood is a Chief Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Systems Science at UNSW. His study interests include how the various processes in the atmosphere conspire to establish climate, how these processes might be expected to control the way climate changes, and how the atmosphere will ultimately interact with the oceans and other components of Earth.

Prof. Sherwood’s Fellowship project ‘Revisiting the physics of clouds’ aims to bring new rigour to climate modelling by improving our understanding of key phenomena like clouds and storms. Earth’s climate has taken a number of turns in the recent and geologic past that so far cannot be reproduced in models. Clouds and atmospheric turbulence are also a problem for weather and climate prediction, the conceptual understanding of which now has evident flaws.

The hypothesis of Prof. Sherwood’s project is that these two problems are strongly linked, and that this link may be exploited to solve problems across disciplines. This project aims to systematically re-evaluate our conceptual understanding of cloud physics, and investigate how this affects our understanding of climate phenomena in Earth’s past and future.

Further information on the Australian Research Council Australian Laureate Fellowships is available at: http://www.arc.gov.au/2015-australian-laureate-fellows-0.

The information on the Fellowships contained in this article is provided under Creative Commons (CC BY 3.0 AU) at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/au/deed.en

Professor Steve Sherwood. Image: supplied.

Professor Trevor McDougall. Image: supplied.

http://www.arc.gov.au/2015-australian-laureate-fellows-0

http://www.arc.gov.au/2015-australian-laureate-fellows-0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/au/deed.en


AMOS National Conference Awards

Congratulations to the winners of the Best Student Talk and the Best Poster Awards at the AMOS 2015 National Conference.

It was a tie for Best Student Talk with Acacia Pepler and Damien Irving leading the pack on 25/25 points.

Pepler spoke on ‘East Coast Low Projections from a Regional Climate Model Ensemble’, whilst Irving covered ‘A Minimum Standard for Publishing Computational Results in the Weather and Climate Sciences’.

With a score of 22.5/25, Karuru Wamahiu took out the Best Poster Award for: ‘Influence of domain location, spatial extent, and resolution in resolving coastal precipitation from cold-fronts in the southwest of Western Australia’.

Fun! The AMOS Melbourne Centre get together over trivia, paper aeroplanes, pizza and beer. Images: Shannon Mason.

News

More awarded AMOS members

News from the Centres

Melbourne Centre NewsShannon MasonMelbourne Centre

The Melbourne Centre is glad to report that its first AMOS Trivia Night, held at the University of Melbourne’s School of Earth Science on Thursday 11 June, was a great success.

Around 30 contestants were attracted by the pizza and beer, with AMOS members and non-members from Melbourne and Monash Universities, CSIRO Aspendale, and the Bureau of Meteorology Training Centre well-represented.

In addition to five challenging rounds of team trivia on topics from science to history and the arts, bonus rounds

included individual sudden-death trivia and a spectacular (and often catastrophic) paper aeroplane throwing contest. Members of the winning team were each presented with a home weather station.

Special thanks go to Andrew King for wearing the Quizmaster’s tiara, and to Sonya Fiddes, Kane Stone, Mandy Freund and Nick Earl for their hard work in organising and promoting the event, and compiling trivia questions.



Pearman Lecture and Trophy Sonya Fiddes University of Melbourne

The Melbourne AMOS centre recently held the annual Pearman Lecture at CSIRO Aspendale on 1 May. This year also saw the return of the volleyball tournament, a round robin between the four AMOS Melbourne hubs: Monash University, the University of Melbourne, CSIRO and the Bureau. Our invited speaker was Dr. Melita Keywood, of CSIRO, who spoke about her recent adventure aboard the new RV Investigator. This ship provides exciting opportunities for scientists of many disciplines, and Melita highlighted her involvement in atmospheric chemistry and composition along with the many shiny new instruments aboard the ship.

Upon its maiden scientific voyage the RV Investigator took the first in-situ measurements of Southern Ocean clouds. For the first time in two decades atmospheric aerosol and composition measurements were composed for the region; a great step for understanding the Southern Ocean’s atmosphere.

Melita also discussed life aboard the research vessel, giving us a virtual tour of the ship’s common areas, its aerosol lab and the stunning sights that can be seen in this remote

area of the world, whilst also describing some of the more unusual traditions that occur when you pass 60°S.

As the lecture wound up, attendees were provided with cakes and refreshments in the sunshine, whilst our eager vollyballers played off for the glory of the Pearman Trophy.

Unfortunately, the Bureau was able to field just one player, who found himself instead playing for both the University of Melbourne and the Monash University teams.

Two round robins were held, and a clear winner became apparent, with CSIRO finishing undefeated. Monash and the University of Melbourne drew, each with one win and three losses.

Overall, it was a highly enjoyable event; a great talk by Melita, delicious food, clear skies, and some friendly competition.

AMOS Melbourne would like to thank all who attended, Melita for speaking and Kelly Merrin for her wonderful catering. We are looking forward to doing it again next year!

Sun and games for the Pearman Trophy. Images: Sonya Fiddes.



NSW Centre NewsFiona Johnson Chair, NSW Centre

After some successful events in 2014, the AMOS NSW centre is again organising a series of events to promote AMOS along with careers in oceanography and the climate and atmospheric sciences to undergraduate students at the universities in NSW.

We attended the Marine Science Meet and Greet run by the University of Sydney Institute of Marine Science (USIMS) in March. In May we held an event at the Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW which was attended by a number of undergraduate students as well as Ph.D. candidates and academics. It was a great chance for the undergraduates to hear about the different careers that are possible in climate science, meteorology and oceanography.

The Newcastle event will be held at the start of second semester so stay tuned for more information soon.

Our first seminar for the year was by Dick Whitaker, Chief Meteorologist with Sky News Weather. Dick gave a presentation on ‘Gods to Gigabytes—a Brief History of Weather Forecasting’ which charted the path from Australian Aboriginal and folklore knowledge of weather and climate through to the present generation of numerical weather prediction.

Seeing such clear progress over the last 500 years in our knowledge and ability to forecast the weather was really interesting.

Most of the attendees also got to see a slide rule for the first time.

Dick often uses a similar version of the talk with community and school groups so we had a very interesting discussion afterwards about the common questions and misconceptions that he sees when talking to the community.

Informative: Dick Whitaker talks to the NSW AMOS Centre about the history of weather forecasting. Image: Fiona Johnson.

AMOS Sydney Weatherwatch GroupThe first meeting of the newly formed AMOS Sydney Weatherwatch Group was held in Turramurra, NSW on Wednesday 27 May. Weatherwatch itself has been an active group for a long time, but AMOS only recently began sponsoring the group meetings.

The meeting discussions ran for about two hours and focussed on the East Coast Lows that hit NSW on

20–23 April and 1–3 May. The warming of the Coral Sea, interesting Chilean weather from the Atacama to Patagonia, and key weather events in 2014 were also discussed.

The next meeting will take place on Wednesday 26 August and features Shayne McGregor from UNSW, who will talk about ENSO.


Dear Colleague CAWCR Annual Workshop 2015: First Announcement The Collaboration for Australian Weather and Climate Research (CAWCR) is pleased to announce its 9th Annual Workshop to be held at the Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, from the 19-22 October 2015. The workshop will bring together Australian experts from the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO, the Universities and Research Centres, as well as a number of prominent overseas scientists. This year’s workshop will focus on coupled modelling and prediction across weather and climate timescales. It will address the status and prospects for improving our understanding, simulation and prediction of coupled processes, particularly as related to advancing our capability to predict high impact weather and climate. Key themes will include: • Short- to medium range coupled modelling • Land-atmosphere interactions • Ocean-atmosphere coupled processes • High impact weather • Coupled data assimilation and reanalysis • Current status and future opportunities Early career scientists are encouraged to attend. For more information please refer to the workshop website. Details of the keynote speakers, program and registration will be provided as available. Dates and venue: 19-22 October 2015, Bureau of Meteorology, 700 Collins Street, Melbourne Program: To be announced. Speakers are by invitation. Registration: Free. Registration is required for attendance. Registration details to be announced. Website: http://cawcr.gov.au/events/AWS9/index.php Contact: [email protected] We look forward to seeing you there. Imtiaz Dharssi (Chair), Dave Bi, Gary Brassington, Debbie Hudson, Ruth Lorenz, Ying-Ping Wang Scientific Organising Committee 19 June 2015


Comment

Ocean and climate research has come a long way in 30 yearsKenneth LeeDirector, Oceans and Atmosphere Flagship at CSIRO

Thirty years ago, a four-day weather forecast was a big deal. Today, thanks to advances in modelling, computing power, observation coverage and data assimilation, the forecast a week ahead is as accurate as the four-day forecast was in the 1980s.

In 1985, the first compact disc was launched to consumers, the first “.com” registered, and Windows 1 was released. It was also the year that CSIRO’s marine laboratories were opened in Hobart, and Australia’s first oceanographic research ship was launched.

The marine labs are one of the three key institutions of marine research in Tasmania, along with the Australian Antarctic Division and the University of Tasmania. Ocean and atmosphere scientists in Tasmania are the largest concentration of this field in the Southern Hemisphere, and Hobart is the gateway to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica—one of the planet’s two main “weather factories”.

Since 1985 the labs have identified and found solutions to contemporary problems and researched others as they emerged to help industry and government to make crucial decisions.

Fishing for answersWe developed the Atlantis ecosystem model, which simulates the marine environment and its interaction with

human activities. It combines oceanography, chemistry and biology, and incorporates ecological processes such as consumption, migration, predation and mortality—as well as socio-economic factors.

Using this modelling can help coastal communities make decisions about the way they live. It can also help industries, such as fisheries, oil and gas, shipping, ports, biosecurity and tourism, make decisions taking into account economic and social factors.

Fisheries managers can now “test drive” different approaches to balancing resource use and conservation, instead of acting on best guesses. The United Nations rates it as the best ecosystem model in the world, and regional versions are being used to support management strategy evaluation in more than 30 ecosystems worldwide.

Ocean forecastsOur research during the past 30 years on ocean and atmosphere observing systems and modelling has also played a major role in the development of ocean forecasting, seasonal prediction systems and state-of-the-art climate models.

The BLUElink system, which CSIRO developed with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the Royal Australian Navy, uses complex data streams from a range of sources, both sea and sky, to create comprehensive

The Argo ocean profiling floats are part of a year-round monitoring network for the world’s oceans. Image: Alicia Navidad/CSIRO.


ocean forecasts.

BLUElink predicts all types of marine weather scenarios, from local beach conditions to oceanic interactions on a global scale. It is like providing a weather prediction for the ocean. For example, BLUElink provides forecasts of the ocean’s temperature, its salinity, and other conditions from the surface down to the sea floor.

BLUElink provides a critical capability to Australia’s naval tactical operations, supporting Royal Australian Navy intelligence for tactical decision making and operational exercises. It helps to locate and map historical shipwrecks and hazardous areas—and it supports search and rescue efforts between Australia and other countries.

The oil and gas industry has used ocean forecasting techniques developed in BLUElink to assist with structural design, operational safety and oil spill management. The same techniques provided predictions of the spread of the 2009 Montara oil spill off Western Australia.

Central to all this work have been our previous research vessels, RV Franklin and RV Southern Surveyor. With our new RV Investigator, we’ll now be able to travel further into the Southern Ocean than previous vessels, opening up new frontiers for research. With its eight dedicated research laboratories, plus other science-related spaces, RV Investigator can collect data ranging from the salinity of the deep ocean to the temperature of the air anywhere it goes, and carry out specialised research on board.

Watching the oceansSuccessive ships have supported our work on air sampling—vital for climate research.

They’ve also been crucial to global research program initiatives on the ocean currents in the Pacific, Indian and Southern Oceans that influence marine environmental and climatic conditions around the world.

This sampling also includes the deployment of Argo floats

as part of a worldwide marine observation and sampling collaboration of more than 3,750 floats.

For instance, the data from the Argo floats have shown that the oceans are continuing to warm at a rate of 0.002C each year—a tiny figure that represents an enormous amount of heat.

And that brings us to climate. Thirty years ago our model was a basic atmosphere with a slab ocean. Now we have an integrated Earth system simulator. This has had a huge impact on our ability to predict extremes and plan for disaster mitigation.

Our improved climate modelling has also increased our understanding of both the El Niño/Southern Oscillation in the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean Dipole. We now know, for example, that successive positive Indian Ocean Dipole readings are predictors of bad bushfire seasons. What can be predicted can be planned for.

Our Cape Grim air sampling with the Bureau of Meteorology, too, has fed into our climate knowledge, providing the Southern Hemisphere’s first ongoing measurements of increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere. It also monitors other atmospheric pollutants some of which, like ozone-depleting CFCs, are now showing declining concentrations.

Importantly, our modelling shows that the climate projections of 30 years ago have come true. The Earth is warming, sea level is rising, and weather extremes such as heatwaves are becoming more frequent. This knowledge and these projections can help us plan for the future.

This article was orginally published on 5 May 2015 at The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/ocean-and-climate-research-has-come-a-long-way-in-thirty-years-41164

The Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station, funded and

managed by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology,

detects atmospheric changes as part of a scientific research

program jointly supervised by CSIRO and the Bureau.

Image: CSIRO.

Comment

https://theconversation.com/ocean-and-climate-research-has-come-a-long-way-in-thirty-years-41164


Special Feature

A glowing coincidenceWayne Painter

With 2015 being the International Year of Light, it seemed fitting that Wayne Painter, a retired supervising technician in electronics manufacturing, focussed on the glow of the sky and water for this issue of BAMOS.The whole thing started when four Aurora hunting friends tripped over the bioluminescence at South Arm Beach, just south of Hobart. They mentioned it on the Aurora Australis Tasmania Facebook page (find out more about them in the following article!—Ed), and gained interest from there.

The concentration of the biomass was big enough to attract attention and it wasn’t long before the news got onto it. Then BOOM!—half of Tassie was at South Arm splashing about in the shallows at night with their kids and having a ball.

This made things a bit difficult on the photography side and doing time lapse shots with splashing people blurs in them. By 18 May everybody had jumped on the bandwagon.

I thought we (my wife and I) would check out our local surf beach—the only good surf beach for a long way. We figured that it was here at Carlton that the surf agitation would show it up.

Sure enough it glowed, and far stronger than I had expected.

At times the waves for the 2.7km stretch of our beach lit up an electric blue, usually when the surf was at its strongest on the incoming tide. It seemed that if one Noctiluca scintillans flashed then it set off others near it, so the electric blue spread quickly, indicating how big the biomass actually was: huge, judging by the fact that it went so far along the incoming waves.

Double whammy: the sky and waters glow down at Park Beach, Carlton in Tasmania. 18 May 2015 between 10 p.m. and 12:15 a.m. Image: Wayne Painter.


Special Feature

Having said that, not all of the waves lit up, only the heavier ones. Sometimes it was patchy, and at other times there were very long runs through the waves. It was a visual feast and unbelievably, we were the only ones seeing or photographing here—everyone was at South Arm getting close-ups of the bloom.

Our other advantage was that from our location we faced south, putting us virtually directly in line with the Aurora in the background.

Two coincidental glowing natural phenomena had to make good camera fodder, we just had to juggle exposure times to capture both at once. From about 10pm until just about midnight we shot some 300+ pics, in between “wows, OMGs and woohoos”.

The mist built up just after midnight and fogged our lenses. The Aurora was also fading, so we left.

The fact that the waves are often indistinct in form (in these pictures) is due to the 10 second exposures, with the waves moving. To capture the waves as still would have required an impossibly high ISO that would have resulted in extremely grainy and virtually useless shots.

I thought the “overarching” Milky Way made an aesthetic addition to the longer shots down the beach, facing south-east.

The shot with the Aurora at its best faced south. It wasn’t a particularly strong one, which was good because it may have eclipsed the bioluminescence.

To have the duality of an Aurora and the bioluminescence in the same shot, both natural light emitting phenomena, was a privilege that probably won’t be repeated any time soon!

(The Noctiluca scintillans is a dinoflagellate. This is an introduced species in the Southern Ocean, notoriously known for killing fish.—Ed.)

The Milky Way looks on as the bioluminescence rolls in at Park Beach, Carlton in Tasmania on 18 May 2015 between 10 p.m. and 12:15 a.m. Image: Wayne Painter.


The phenomenon has always occurred right over Tasmania, but social media is behind a recent increase in awareness and photography of the Aurora Australis.

The Aurora Chasers is a rapidly growing community based out of the Apple Isle, with its members now numbering in the thousands.

On “high potential” nights, some are glued to the glow of one particular Facebook page. When the “alert” goes off, hundreds pack up and embark on a pilgrimage to the darkest location they can find. And often, when they find the right spot, there will be hundreds of others gathering, their eyes to the southern sky, all in search of the same thing: the lights.

“Some people I would never know in the daylight because I have only ever seen them at night time rugged up,” says Katinka Smith, one of Hobart’s leading Aurora Australis photographers.

Katinka says that as a teen she visited the NASA website daily to view the ‘photo of the day’ and dreamt that one day she would take “awesome photos of cool things in space”.

“In 2012, I started seeing some great Aurora images from some local photographers on Facebook and knew that while I didn’t have the gear to get space shots, Auroras were going to be the next coolest thing for me.”

The local photographers that caught Katinka’s eye are part of a Facebook community under the group Aurora Australis Tasmania. When talked about, they’re more commonly known as the Aurora Chasers.

The group was set up by Tasmanian artist, Margaret Sonneman, who herself witnessed an Aurora Australis three years ago. Wanting to find out more, she searched for any kind of notification system that could tell her when an Aurora was most likely. Not satisfied with what she found, she set up a Facebook page that could serve as a real-time alert for anyone interested. In doing so, she found she’d both created and tapped into an enthusiastic and informed community of Aurora chasers. The group now boasts more than 23,000 members. “Many are overseas members who plan, or hope, to visit Tasmania,” admits Margaret. But about 2,000 of those are locals, who share when and where they can see an Aurora and at what magnitude it’s occurring, all in real-time.

The Aurora Australis, captured by Katinka Smith from Howden, Tasmania on 2 March 2013.

On the front cover

Chasing AurorasMelissa Lyne


What makes an Aurora viewing so appealing? Quite simply, Margaret says, “The sheer beauty of an Aurora event just takes your breath away.” She recalls a favourite moment in her chasing: in July last year, she saw a bright, though brief, red and green across the night sky.

“This is the only time I’ve really seen intense colour without a camera,” Margaret explains. “Usually the colour is quite muted to the naked eye. Our eyes aren’t really designed to see colour at night, but the camera can pick up the colours of even a faint Aurora.”

And what kind of camera skills do you need to capture an Aurora? Ask any chaser and they will quickly answer that this is not a job for iPhones. “Unless you are shooting through night vision gear,” adds Margaret. “I’ve seen it done!”

Otherwise, you will need to make your camera, SLR or digital SLR, sensitive to light. Katinka explains this means the camera has to be set to manual.

“The shutter usually needs to be open for 10–30 seconds, the aperture as wide as it will go and a high ISO in the thousands.”

Auroras occur when high-powered particles ejected from the sun collide with oxygen molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere, producing green and red colours. Winter is usually the best time to capture an event, because, as Katinka points out, there are simply more hours of darkness, and so more opportunities.

She says the brightest Aurora she has seen to date was on 29 June 2013, which she photographed from Oatlands, Tasmania, (and is on the BAMOS front cover!—Ed).

But the biggest and most impressive event for her was on 15 July 2012, sparked by an X1.4 solar flare, when Auroras lasted on Earth for more than 30 hours.

The event was photographed all around the world, and NASA also used one of Katinka’s images from the night in their video covering the event.

Katinka is also featured in Margaret’s book, ‘The Aurora Chasers Handbook’, as a contributing author. In this book, Margaret has compiled everything you need to know about Aurora chasing. Margaret’s two top tips are:

1. Find a good viewing location in daylight hours. It should have a clear view to the South with as little light pollution as possible (so, get away from a town) and with no trees or hills obscuring the southerly view. Hilltops and coastal areas work well, but stay safe!

2. Familiarise yourself with the indicators that let you know if an Aurora is likely. These can be found on the Facebook group files, and in the book. The group is most helpful if the science side isn’t your cup of tea—they will

just tell you when one is happening!

Katinka adds, “the Facebook group is a great place to start for those new to Aurora chasing. There are some very impressive experts in the group who give helpful information, advice and predictions.”

“I personally keep an eye on www.spaceweather.com to get a good picture of some decent looking sunspots or coronal holes and to find out about any solar activity.”

“Once there is a solar event that has the potential to trigger an Aurora—for example an earthbound Coronal Mass Ejection or an earth facing coronal hole—then I keep an eye on the data produced by the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) satellite. In particular I want to know solar wind speed, Kp-index1, and the polarity of the interplanetary magnetic field (the ‘bz’ number).”

“I like the bz to be around -10 and wind speeds around 400 km/sec. Websites that show the auroral oval are good too and most apps have this kind of information. Coronal holes usually produce good sustained Auroras that can last all night.”

Katinka says the Facebook page is where you can learn as little or as much as you like.

“Everyone is friendly and helpful. It is probably the best and easiest way to get a heads up on any incoming activity or to decode what the stats might mean.”

And it’s not just for those in Tasmania.

1 The Kp-index is a global geomagnetic storm index with a scale of 0 to 9. Based on the Kp-index, you can immediately know if there is a chance to see aurora or not.

On the front cover

Margaret Sonneman’s guide to Aurora chasing.

www.spaceweather.com


On the front cover

An exercise physiologist by day, Theresa moved to Tasmania at the start of 2014, joining the Aurora Australis Tasmania Facebook group about six months before the move.

Her advice for catching an Aurora is: be prepared to wait. “Sometimes, the Aurora will “play”, revealing and hiding itself over a couple of hours.”

She also says that having a weather app on your mobile

phone can be of assistance. “For instance, setting photography gear up on a beach that is in high tide may not be suitable.”

“Oh, and make sure batteries are always charged, even on your phone. Communication between you and the Facebook page could be the difference in seeing as well as getting a photograph of the Aurora.”

“I could clearly see the beams and ribbons of colour moving across the south for well over an hour.”

—Aurora chaser Theresa Ockenden on taking her favourite shot of an Aurora from Howrah Beach in Hobart.

“Auroras have been photographed in parts of Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia,” says Katinka.

“The key thing in the more populated states is going to be getting away from light pollution and having an unobstructed view south.”

For more information on chasing the Aurora Australis, please explore the following links.

Aurora Australia Tasmania Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/auroraaustralis

The Aurora Chasers Handbook: http://aurorachaserbook.com

Katinka’s photography and blog: http://katinkasmith.com.au and Instagram @katinka_smith

More Aurora chasing

http://www.facebook.com/groups/auroraaustralis

http://www.facebook.com/groups/auroraaustralis

http://aurorachaserbook.com

http://aurorachaserbook.com




Where does this email find you?

At a French chateau in the Loire valley, on a week’s cycling holiday with my wife, and about to begin a 6-month sabbatical at MIT in Boston.

What do you do?

I conduct research into the ocean’s role in climate, particularly ocean mixing processes and ocean thermodynamics.

Why did you get into it?

After a degree in mechanical engineering (from the University of Adelaide) and a short stint designing air conditioning systems for hospitals, I went to the University of Cambridge to undertake a Ph.D. On arrival, George Batchelor assigned me to Stewart Turner who suggested a Ph.D. project on mixing in the ocean mixed layer, and since then I have never stopped studying the ocean. It was almost ten years later before we all realised that anthropogenic climate change was a concern, and this concern has turbocharged ocean and atmosphere science ever since.

What is the best thing about what you do?

Actually three things: the joy of discovery, variety and mentoring.

(1) The process of discovering some brand new aspect of the science is thrilling and fulfilling. The act of discovery can sometimes occur in a minute, but usually takes hours or weeks to confirm (or disprove). I can tell you where I was and what time of day it was when I had my best five ideas. Joint discoveries with a colleague create a deep and lasting bond with that person.

(2) At different times I have conducted ocean research through (i) observations at sea from a bucking ship, (ii) laboratory experiments, (iii) building new ocean-going equipment, (iv)

Meet a Member

Trevor McDougall

AMOS member Trevor McDougall

Our June Meet a Member is an AMOS Fellow and a newly minted ARC Laureate Fellow. His job is Scientia Professor of Ocean Physics at the School of Mathematics and Statistics, UNSW. Pretty big titles, but as we find out, he is also a guy who loves sharing knowledge, and is always up for a bit of adventure!

theoretical studies with a pen and paper, (v) modelling studies on large computers, and (vi) planning experiments and gaining consensus among colleagues on international committees. Oceanography is a field that offers huge variety, and your career will only be boring if you allow it to be.

(3) One of the most satisfying things is to work with graduate students. My students have taught me plenty about the ocean, and I aim to keep learning from them.

What did you want to do when you were 10?

I wanted to be an investment banker, without quite knowing what they did, but I had read about them.

How do you relax?

I really enjoy the daily exercise provided by the 45-minute cycle ride each way to work and back.

What is your favourite holiday destination?

Going on a multi-day bush walk with friends in the wilderness of south-west Tasmania.


The Research Corner with Damien Irving

Workflow automation

In previous articles I’ve discussed the various tools I use for data analysis. I use the netCDF Operators (NCO) for making simple edits to the attributes of netCDF files, Climate Data Operators (CDO) for routine calculations on netCDF files, and a whole range of Python libraries for doing more complicated analysis and visualisation. In years gone by I’ve also included NCL and Fortran in the mix. Such diversity is pretty common (i.e. almost nobody uses a single programming language or tool for all their analysis) so this article is my attempt at an overview of workflow automation. In other words, how should one go about tying together the various tools they use to produce a coherent, repeatable data analysis pipeline?

The first thing to note is that the community has not converged on a single best method for workflow automation. Instead, there appear to be three broad options depending on the complexity of your workflow and the details of the tools involved:

1. Write programs that act like any other command line tool and then combine them with a shell script or build manager

2. Use an off-the-shelf workflow management system

3. Write down the processing steps in a lab notebook and re-execute them manually

Let’s consider these approaches one by one:

Command lineDespite the fact that its commands are infuriatingly terse and cryptic, the Unix shell has been around longer than most of its users have been alive. It has survived so long because of the ease with which (a) repetitive tasks can be automated and (b) existing programs can be combined in new ways. Given that NCO and CDO are command line tools (i.e. you’re probably going to be using the command line anyway), it could be argued that the command line is the most natural home for workflow automation in the weather and climate sciences. For instance, in order to integrate my Python scripts with the rest of my workflow,

I use the argparse library to make those scripts act like any other command line program. They can be executed from the command line, ingest arguments and options from the command line (which is known as “parsing” the command line), combine themselves with other command line programs via pipes and filters, and output help information just like a regular command line program.

Armed with my collection of command line-native Python scripts, the easiest way to link multiple processing steps is to store them in a shell script. For instance, I could execute the following hypothetical workflow by storing all the steps (i.e. command line entries) in a shell script called run_streamfunction.sh.

1. Edit the “units” attribute of the original zonal and meridional wind data netCDF files (NCO)

2. Calculate the streamfunction from the zonal and meridional wind (calc_streamfunction.py)

3. Calculate the streamfunction anomaly by subtracting the climatological mean at each timestep (CDO)

4. Apply a 30 day running mean to the streamfunction anomaly data (CDO)

5. Plot the average streamfunction anomaly for a time period of interest (plot_streamfunction.py)

This would be a perfectly valid approach if I was dealing with a small dataset, but let’s say I wanted to process 6 hourly data from the JRA-55 reanalysis dataset over the period 1958-2014 for the entire globe. The calc_streamfunction.py script I wrote would take days to run on the server in my department in this situation, so I’d rather not execute every single step in run_streamfunction.sh every time I change the time period used for the final plot. What I need is a build manager—a smarter version of run_streamfunction that can figure out whether previous steps have already been executed and if they need to be updated.

The most widely used build manager on Unix and its derivatives is called Make. Like the Unix shell it’s old, cryptic and idiosyncratic, but it’s also fast, free and well-documented, which means it has stood the test of time.

run_streamfunction.sh

calc_streamfunction.py

plot_streamfunction.py



run_streamfunction.sh


I started using Make to manage my workflows about a year ago and it has revolutionised the way I work. I like it because of the documentation and also the fact that it’s available no matter what machine I’m on, however there are other options (e.g. doit, makeflow, snakemake, ruffus) if you’d like something a little less cryptic.

To learn how to apply the command line approach to your own workflow automation, check out these Software Carpentry lessons:

• Command line programs1

• Data management in the ocean, weather and climate sciences2

• Automating an analysis pipeline using Make3 or doit4

Workflow management systemsThe command line discussion above suggests the use of shell scripts for automating small, simple data processing pipelines, and build managers like Make and doit for pipelines that are either slightly more complicated or have steps that you’d rather not repeat unnecessarily (e.g. steps that take many hours / days to run). For many weather and climate scientists (myself included), this is as far as you’ll need to go. Make and doit have all the functionality you’ll ever need for automatically executing a data analysis pipeline, and by following the process laid out in the data management lesson above you’ll be able to document that pipeline (i.e. produce a record of the provenance of your data).

But what if you’re working on a project that is too big and complicated for a simple Makefile or two? The management of uber-complex workflows such as those associated with running coupled climate models or processing the whole CMIP5 data archive can benefit greatly from specialised workflow management systems like VisTrails, pyRDM, Sumatra or Pegasus. These systems

1 http://swcarpentry.github.io/python-novice-inflammation/10-cmdline.html2 http://damienirving.github.io/capstone-oceanography/3 http://swcarpentry.github.io/make-novice/4 http://software-carpentry.org/v5/intermediate/doit/

can do things like manage resource allocation for parallel computing tasks, execute steps that aren’t run from the command line, automatically publish data to a repository like Figshare and produce nice flowcharts and web interfaces to visualise the entire workflow.

I’ve only just begun to explore the capabilities of these types of systems, so I’d love to hear from anyone who has experience with them. In particular, I’m curious to know whether such tools could be used for smaller / simpler workflows, or whether the overhead associated with setting up and learning the system cancels out any benefit over simpler options like Make and doit.

The semi-manual approachWhile writing scripts that can parse the command line is a relatively simple and natural thing to do in Python, it’s not the type of workflow that is typically adopted by users of more self-contained environments like MATLAB, IDL or R. From my limited experience / exposure, it appears that users of these environments tend not to link the data processing that happens within MATLAB, IDL or R with processing that happens outside of it. For instance, they might pre-process their data using NCO or CDO at the command line, before feeding the resulting data files into MATLAB to perform additional data processing and visualisation. This break in the workflow implies that some manual intervention is required to check whether previous processing steps need to be executed and to initiate the next step in the process (i.e. something that Make or doit would do automatically). Manual checking and initiation is not particularly problematic for smaller pipelines, but can be error prone (and time consuming) as workflows get larger and more complex.

Since I’m by no means an expert in MATLAB, IDL or R, I’d love to hear how regular users of those tools manage their workflows.

The Research Corner with Damien Irving


Charts from the Past with Blair Trewin

9 May 1980Slow-moving blocking highs are a feature of the Australian autumn, but even by normal standards, that of late April and early May 1980 was significant. The ridge first appeared west of Western Australia on 23 April, and moved slowly east to be centred over Tasmania at the start of May. Its movement slowed even further from this point, being centred over the south Tasman Sea by the 6th, and over New Zealand for the following week, and finally breaking down on the 13th.

A strong blocking high near or south of 40°S means easterlies on the east coast, and is not an uncommon scenario for troughs or east coast lows to the north. For the first few days of May 1980, significant rain was largely confined to the north coast of New South Wales, becoming heavier from the 5th onwards, with daily totals of 123 mm at Urunga on the 5th, and 199 mm at Meerschaumvale (near Ballina) on the 6th.

By the 6th, a surface trough had formed off the coast, and this developed further into a small low off Fraser Island on the 7th. Very heavy rain developed on the 7th in south-east Queensland, especially along the immediate coastal strip, with 327 mm at Bongaree, on Bribie Island. Numerous sites in metropolitan Brisbane (including Brisbane itself, with 118 mm) exceeded 100 mm, and there were also three-figure falls in the Gold Coast hinterland and the upper Tweed.

Rainfall totals were slightly less extreme on the 8th as the low moved temporarily out to sea, but it intensified and moved back towards the coast on the 9th. This was the wettest day of the event on both sides of the border. Brisbane had its wettest May day on record (since broken in 2015) with 149 mm and daily totals exceeded 200 mm in the southern suburbs, but the heaviest falls were in the

mountains further south. The 380 mm at Springbrook (part of a four-day total of 857 mm) is Queensland’s fourth-highest May daily total, and a number of other sites in both Queensland and New South Wales were in the 300s. Throughout this period, anticyclonic conditions with light winds prevailed over southeast Australia (and it was quite warm in places, including 25.7°C at Melbourne on the 8th), but with a moist air mass, fog was more prevalent than frost, especially in Tasmania and Victoria.

The low then took a very unusual trajectory, tracking southwest across New South Wales on the 10th before becoming absorbed into a frontal system crossing southern Australia on the 11th. Significant rain spread down the full length of the New South Wales coast on the 10th, with falls over 200 mm in both the north (261 mm at Lynchs Creek, 247 mm at Comboyne) and south (224 mm at Robertson). A second band of rain followed the track of the low from the northeast to southwest of the state, with Nyngan’s 85 mm the most notable inland fall. This was the last day of very heavy rain for the event, with widespread but mostly light to moderate falls in southeast Australia with the passing front on the 11th.

Much of northeast New South Wales and southeast Queensland had been in significant drought prior to this event, which reduced the potential for flooding, but there was still moderate to major flooding on a number of coastal New South Wales rivers, including the Clarence, Tweed, Richmond, Bellinger and Macleay. In Queensland, there was significant localised flooding in various Brisbane metropolitan creeks, and to a lesser extent in the Logan and Albert rivers. While gales occurred on the coast on the 7th, wind damage was minimal. The major impact of the flooding was in the form of traffic disruptions, with only limited property damage.

Synoptic chart for 0000 UTC, 9 May 1980.


Calendar

2015August2–7 12th Annual Meeting, Asia Oceania Geosciences (AOGS), Singapore

10-11 Understanding Processes for Extreme Precipitation, Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne

17–21 IGU Regional Conference, Lomonosov, Moscow, Russia

23–28 3rd Heidelberg Laureate Forum, Germany

26–28 MODES workshop on normal-mode function theory and applications to observations, NWP, and climate research, Boulder, CO, USA

September7–10 3rd Conference on Modelling Hydrology, Climate

and Land Surface Processes, Lillehammer, Norway

October5–9 11th International Conference on Southern Hemisphere Meteorology and Oceanography, Santiago, Chile

19–22 CAWCR Annual Workshop, Coupled Modelling and Prediction: from Weather to Climate, Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne

27–29 4th Pages Aus2k Workshop, Auckland, New Zealand

27–30 GREENHOUSE 2015: Atmosphere, oceans and ice, Hobart, Tasmania

November16–19 2nd World Congress on Disaster Management, Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India

17–19 International Conference on the “Water and Energy cycles in the Tropics” Institut d’Océanographie, Paris, France

23–25 Meteorological Society of New Zealand—Annual Conference. Meteorology and Ocean, Raglan, New Zealand

29 November–4 December Biannual MODSIM2015 congress of the Modelling and Simulations Society of Australia and New Zealand, Gold Coast, Australia.

30 November–4 December International Symposium on the Indian Ocean - “Dynamics of the Indian Ocean: Perspective and Retrospective”, Goa, India

December14–18 AGU Fall Meeting, San Francisco, USA

2016January10–14 AMS Annual Meeting, New Orleans, USA

February8–11 AMOS National Conference 2016, Melbourne

21–26 AGU Ocean Sciences Meeting, New Orleans, LA, USA

Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Journal

Articles — Vol. 64 No. 4, December 2014Louis. Gridded return values of McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index across New South Wales.

Dittus et al. An investigation of some unexpected frost day increases in southern Australia.

Cottrill and Kuleshov. An assessment of rainfall seasonal forecasting skill from the statistical model SCOPIC using four predictors.

Le Marshall et al. Improving tropospheric and stratospheric moisture analysis with hyperspectral infrared radiances.

Green. Gorwing season air temperature lapse rate in the Snowy Mountains.

Klekociuk et al. The Antarctic ozone hole during 2011.

Klekociuk et al. The Antarctic ozone hole during 2012.

Regular features:

Tihema. Seasonal climate summary southern hemisphere (summer 2013–14): Warmer than average summer; neutral ENSO conditions.

Ganter. Seasonal climate summary southern hemisphere (autumn 2014): Tropical Pacific experiences strong push toward El Niño.

Wu. Quarterly Numerical Weather Prediction Model Performance Summary—July to September 2014..


BAMOS Author Guidelines

For all submissions:The Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (BAMOS) accepts short (<2500 words) contributions of original research work for peer-review and consideration in the “Science Articles” section. Longer articles will be considered at the discretion of the Editor and Editor-in-Chief. Articles submitted to BAMOS should also be appropriate for the whole AMOS community (from weather enthusiasts to professional members) and should aim to be concise without using excessive scientific jargon.

For the peer-reviewed “Science Articles” section, authors should follow these guidelines:

1. Articles should be submitted as a PDF or Word document (or similar) for peer-review and include all figures and tables either within the main text or consecutively at the end of the article.

2. Articles should have a line spacing of 1.5 or more using a font size of 12. Articles should preferably be written using Times New Roman or Arial.

3. Articles should be split into sections, with the heading for each section numbered consecutively and using a font size of 14. For example (these are title examples, headings are made at the authors’ discretion):

1. Introduction

2. Method

3. Results

4. Conclusions

4. An abstract is required and should not be more than 150 words in length.

5. Acknowledgements to be included after the final work section and before the references.

6. References should follow these example formats:

• Journal Articles:

Jung, T., Ferranti, L. and Tompkins, A.M., 2006, Response to the summer of 2003 Mediterranean SST anomalies over Europe and Africa, Journal of Climate, 19, 5439–5454.

• Books:

Holton, J.R., 2004, An Introduction to Dynamic Meteorology. Academic Press, New York. 535 pp.

• Book chapter:

Raymond, D.J., 1993. Chapter 2: Observational constraints on cumulus parameterizations. In: The representation of cumulus convection in numerical models, Meteorological Monographs, 24 (46), 17–28, American Meteorological Society, Boston, USA.

• Theses:

Trewin, B., 2001, Extreme temperature events in Australia. PhD Thesis, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia.

• Web sites:

Department of Sustainability and Environment, 2012, Bushfire history - Major bushfires in Victoria, www.dse.vic.gov.au/fire-and-other-emergencies/major-bushfires-in-victoria/

7. We recommend that the author(s) make five suggestions for referees to undertake the peer-review. Also, we ask for a list of five potential referees whom the author does not want as reviewers, due to conflicts of interest, or past close association..

8. Once peer-review has been completed, a final version of the document should be sent to the editor either in Word format or as plain text. The document should also include figure and table captions and the references but no figures. Figure files should be sent separately (they may be in any format and the editor will confer with the author(s) on the resolution and formatting).

9. Galley-proofs will be sent to the author(s) for final checking before publication.

BAMOS also accepts a wide range of non-peer-reviewed work, for example news items, charts from the past, conference reports, book reviews, biographical articles and meet a member. AMOS members are therefore encouraged to submit articles that would be of general interest to the AMOS community without necessarily requiring peer review. File formats should follow those given above; a word or plain text document should be submitted (which includes any figure captions and tables) along with any figure files given separately.

All articles should be either posted or emailed to the editor with any questions on the formatting also directed to the editor (see the inside back cover of this issue for contact details).

www.dse.vic.gov.au/fire-and-other-emergencies/major-bushfires-in-victoria/



Editor Melissa LyneEmail: [email protected]

Science Editor Willow HallgrenEmail: [email protected]

Associate Editor (oceanography) Christopher Bull

Editor-in-chiefDuncan AckerleyEmail: [email protected]

Assistant EditorsDiana Greenslade, Blair Trewin and Linden Ashcroft.

2015 Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic SocietyISSN 1035-6576

2015 AMOS Council

Contributed articles, news, announcements and correspondence for the Bulletin should be sent to the editor no later than 07 August 2015. They will be reviewed and the galley proofs returned to the author if requested. An ASCII version of the text is required via e-mail or digital media to minimise typographic errors. The August issue will focus on the AMOS 2015 wrap-up. The Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society is produced and distributed with the assistance of CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research and the Bureau of Meteorology.

AMOS Website: www.amos.org.au

ExecutivePresident Todd Lane 03-8344 6516 Vice-President Mary Voice 04-1994 9952 Secretary Damien Irving 03-8344 6911 Treasurer Angela Maharaj 02-9385 0593 Past President Blair Trewin 03-9669 4623

Ordinary MembersAilie Gallant 03-9905 3216Andrew Klekociuk 03 6232 3382 Adam Morgan 03-9905 4424 Neville Nicholls 03-9902 0111 Andy Pitman 02-9385 9766 Ian Watterson 03-9239 4544

AMOS Executive Officer Jeanette Dargaville GPO Box 1289, Melbourne VIC 3001(attn: AMOS admin officer) Phone 0404 471 143E-mail: [email protected]

Sub-Committee ConvenorsPublic Relations Vacant Awards Mark Williams 0419 519 4402016 Conference TBC Education Melissa Lyne 0415-514-328 Angela Maharaj 02-9385-0593

Centre ChairsACT Bob Cechet 02-6268 8883Adelaide Darren Ray 08-8366 2664Brisbane Andrew Wiebe 04-5046 0676 Darwin Ian Shepherd 08-8920 3821 Hobart Andrew Marshall 03-6232 5184 Melbourne Andrew King TBC NSW Fiona Johnson 02-9385 9769 Perth Merv Lynch 08-9266 7540

RepresentativesAMOJ David Karoly 03 8344 4698 Science & TechnologyAustralia Steven Phipps 02-9385 8957

AMOS is represented on the relevant Australian Academy of Science committees.

Regional Sub-editorsMichael Hewson (Brisbane) Shannon Mason (Melbourne)Fiona Johnson (NSW)Bob Cechet (ACT)Craig Macaulay (TAS)Jenny Hopwood (WA)

ContributorsBlair TrewinDamien Irving

Advertising ManagerPlease contact the Executive Officer.

PublisherAMOS,GPO Box 1289,Melbourne VIC 3001, Australia

mailto:[email protected]



http://www.amos.org.au


Innovations For Extreme WeatherRead more www.vaisala.com/gen4 or contact us [email protected]

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All new!Vaisala RS41 Radiosonde

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BAMOS June 2015