Bulletin vol 23 no 3 june 2010

Contents

AMOS Bulletin Volume 23 Number 3

ISSN 1035-6576

Editorial

41

President’s Column

41 42 44

News Conference Report

46 47

News from the Centres Meet a Member Articles C. Ummenhofer – Southern Hemisphere regional precipitation and climate variability: Extremes, trends, and prediction B.Seaman – A retrospective of my years in the Bureau 1959-2009

48

Significant Mescoscale Oceanography Charts from the Past

57 59

Calendar

60

50

Cover picture: The Deep Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on May 24 2010, as captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard NASA’s Terra satellite. Read more about the oil spill in the Significant Mesoscale Oceanography section of this issue (image courtesy of NASA/GSFC, MODIS Rapid Response).

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.

Printed on 100% recycled paper

Editorial All scientists know that the source of information is important. Understanding where your data has came from and how it was created often has a large impact on the end result. Of course, this is not only true in science. When shopping for food it is good to know where your vegetables came from as that affects the price, and often the taste. On meeting people, I find that I don’t get to know someone until I have learnt a little bit about their past. And when digesting the day’s news, it is crucial to check your sources before believing what you see and hear.

Recently I came across an interesting example of this in relation to the unpronounceable volcano in Iceland. With so many news articles written in the last couple of months about “she who cannot be named”, a website with a new take on the topic caught my attention: the total carbon output from the volcano compared to the amount of carbon not emitted by planes during the associated grounding. “Planes versus Volcano?” it asked. The information published on this website went “viral”, and was published in several newspapers and online newsletters. However, on closer inspection the sources of this information were unclear. The website itself made three corrections and the data on the amount of carbon being emitted by the Icelandic darling was changed by a factor of ten during these updates. Finally, an honest apology was published, and a final update given. After following this e-trail of confusion, I’ve decided not to pass on that information in these pages, however you can follow the link below and decide for yourself. Alternatively, you can read about the recent presentation given in Melbourne by Andrew Tupper, an Australian expert in the field of forecasting volcanic ash clouds for aviation purposes.

Data is one area that requires the most stringent of background tests. Metadata, or data about the data is crucial in verifying the quality of a dataset. Similarly, model output is dependent on the initial conditions that are provided. Observational information in particular is prone to inconsistencies and discontinuities that can only be explained by examining the source. Whether the metadata reveals a change in the location of a weather station, a change in observer or, as I read recently, finding a bird or even a football inside a thermometer screen, knowing about the history of data makes it a lot more useful and interesting.

In this issue of the Bulletin, we look at the history and the background story of some Society members. Bob Seaman, who has been with the Bureau of Meteorology for over 50 years, retired recently and he presents some of his thoughts and stories for us. We also introduce a new section called Meet a Member. In this small segment, AMOS members share a little bit about their background, and what makes them tick. For each issue, a member will be selected at random and emailed some questions. All they need to do is answer them, attach a photo of themselves and email back. Who knows? Next time it might be you! This issue we meet Fiona Evans, a member from CSIRO in Western Australia. I look forward to meeting more of you in the future.

Linden Ashcroft Further information: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/ 2010/correction-apology-planes-orvolcano

President’s Column Members in academia will be aware of the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative. This initiative aims to rank all disciplines at Australian universities relative to world-best practice in research, and against other Australian universities. One tool that will be used to assess the quality of research will be a citation analysis focused on high-quality, highly-cited journals. It was disturbing to find out, therefore, that the Monthly Weather Review (MWR) has been omitted from the

ERA list of ranked journals. This was apparently because the Australian Research Council (ARC), which is carrying out the ERA for the Federal Government, was advised by a peak discipline group representing geologists (and not atmospheric scientists) that MWR was not peer-reviewed. On behalf of AMOS, I pointed out that the advice to the ARC was incorrect, and asked that MWR be included in the ERA ranked list since its omission would seriously bias the ERA results and prejudice

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funding for universities where academics publish in this journal. We have been unsuccessful in our attempts to get the ERA journal list corrected.

An even more serious problem has emerged.

Many atmospheric scientists and oceanographers publish in the highly respected and cited Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) and the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR). However, the ERA will not allow papers published in GRL and JGR to be counted as atmospheric sciences or oceanography research. Worse, such papers (even those on meteorology) will be counted as research output of geophysics schools (ie geologists), artificially inflating their productivity while artificially decreasing the productivity of atmospheric sciences and oceanography. So, papers that I have published in these journals will be counted as an output of Monash University, but will be attributed to

the geologists at this university, rather than atmospheric scientists.

Again, we have pointed out this error to the ARC, but they remain unwilling to correct the journal list. Unless the ARC corrects the list of journals and aligns the journals with the correct fields of research, then any ERA-based assessment of atmospheric sciences and oceanography in Australian universities will be worse than useless. It will be biased against some universities (compared with other universities where academics do not publish in MWR) and the overall productivity of the Australian atmospheric and oceanographic research sectors will be biased low (because they cannot count papers in GRL and JGR).

Neville Nicholls (This is an edited version of the President’s Column available at www.amos.org.au - Ed.)

News Lightning causes mushrooms to multiply Engineers at Iwate University in Japan have found that zapping mushroom crops with lightning can double the yield of certain varieties.

This means that if lightning did strike a field, the mushrooms closest to the strike would die, while others that were nearby and received a weaker shock through the soil would thrive.

Japanese farming lore has long seen that mushrooms multiply following a storm. The four-year study tested this belief by exposing different species of mushrooms to artificial lightning in a garden laboratory.

Professor Takaki and his team are not sure yet why mushrooms respond this way to a lightning strike, although they suggest it might be a response to danger. The jolt of electricity would be seen as a threat to the fungi, and in an act of survival, produce an automatic increase in enzyme and protein production.

Zapping logs filled with spores of different mushrooms, the team examined the effects of lightning on mushroom growth. Using the right amount of energy, the study achieved a doubling of the crop yield for shiitake mushrooms. Exposing a log filled with nameko spores produced 80% more mushrooms than a log that was not shocked.

"We have tried these experiments with ten types of mushroom so far and have found that it is effective in eight species," said Koichi Takaki, an associate professor in engineering at Iwate University.

While hitting the mushrooms directly with lightning destroys them, the team found that if the pulse of electricity was decreased (between 50,000 and 100,000 volts compared with the one billion volts of electricity that can sometimes be delivered by lightning), crop yields can be substantially increased.

The next step is to make the ‘jump start’ lightning technology more user friendly, although this remains under development.

"Right now, the equipment that we use to grow these mushrooms is very specialized and complicated, so I want to improve the design to make it easy to operate," Prof. Takaki said.

The group have also begun similar experiments on daikon radishes, with early results suggesting that the species bud earlier if exposed to generated lightning. Other institutions are also testing the effects of lightning on beans, some lily varieties and rapeseed.

Further information: http://news.nationalgeographic.com.au/ news/2010/04/100409-lightningmushrooms-japan-harvest/

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Whale poo has a role to play in the carbon cycle Whale faeces are a crucial ingredient in a healthy ocean, a recent study based in Tasmania has discovered.

Dr Stephen Nicol from the Australian Antarctic Division in Kingston, Tasmania has been examining large amounts of excrement from endangered baleen whales, and has found that it is rich in iron.

Iron is vital for the health of oceans as phytoplankton need it to grow. Phytoplankton also absorb carbon dioxide, meaning that whale poo could indirectly be an important contributor to carbon storage in the Southern Ocean.

Baleen whales filter feed and use brush-like baleen to sieve their food out of the ocean water. Their favourite meal is krill, which in turn feed on the phytoplankton, storing much of the iron from the microscopic morsels in their tissue.

Other studies have already suggested that whales act as iron recyclers by ingesting it in krill and expelling it as faeces, allowing more phytoplankton production. But Dr Nicol’s study is the first to analyse the composition of whale poo to determine how much iron it contains.

His team analysed 27 samples of faeces from four different species of baleen whales. They

found that on average whale faeces contain around 10 million times as much iron as Antarctic seawater. By examining the iron content in whole krill and checking the samples for krill DNA, the team were able to find the missing link in the iron cycle. "We confirmed the vast majority of the iron in the poo came from krill," says Dr Nicol.

He believes that before baleen whales were fished commercially, their droppings could have contributed as much as 12 per cent of the iron available on the surface of the Southern Ocean. When commercial whaling commenced in the late 19th century, Dr Nicol estimates that baleen whales ate around 190 million tonnes of krill each year and produced 7600 tonnes of iron rich poo. This would have lead to more iron being available in the ocean, which would increase the size of the phytoplankton and krill populations. This also would have allowed the Southern Ocean to store larger amounts of carbon dioxide.

"Allowing the great whales to recover will allow the system to slowly reset itself," he says.

Further information: http://www.newscientist.com/article/ dn18807-whale-poop-is-vital-to-oceanscarbon-cycle.html

Vanuatu volcanoes become more active Several volcanoes in Vanuatu have become increasingly active in the last few weeks, forcing the cancellation of some flights and threatening nearby communities.

Mount Yasur is one of the world’s most active volcanoes and is a popular tourist attraction as it often spits fiery lava and rocks. For the last few weeks, however, it has been more active than usual. At the end of May it shot a plume of ash 1.8km into the atmosphere. The ash cloud spread out approximately 340 square kilometres, and disrupted flights in nearby New Caledonia.

This volcanic disturbance is the latest in a series of seismological events in the area.

Another volcano, Mt Garet, in the north of the country has been erupting since December, forcing the evacuation of locals due to harmful gases and falling ash. There is also a volcano on the island of Ambae that has recently been showing signs of potential eruption for the first time in five years. A plume over the island was first spotted by residents in December 2009,

and since then there have been reports of boiling water and drying vegetation in the area.

Vanuatu's Department of Geology, Mines and Water Resources also report that the sulphur emissions from the Manaro Voui volcano have increased to more than 3000 tons per day.

An earthquake of magnitude 7.2 struck of the Vanuatu coast in the South Pacific on May 28, producing a brief tsunami warning. Three quakes also occurred in October 2009. These events occur as the Eyjafjallajökull volcano quietens but continues to rumble away, with small tremors and plumes being observed daily.

Further information: http://www.geohazards.gov.vu/ http://scienceblogs.com/eruptions/ http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/southpacific/3761401/Vanuatu-volcanocauses-disruption

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Conference Report 29th AMS Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology Muhammad Hassim (on behalf of Sally Lavender, Simon Caine and Angilika Werner) School of Earth Sciences, The University of Melbourne As our Toyota Camry pulled into the Hertz rental return bay at Tucson International Airport on 9 May 2010, it dawned upon us that our four-day roadtrip had finally come to an end. We had driven more than 800 miles (approximately 1300 km) and crossed two states (three if you count the little southern tip of Nevada) just to get from Los Angeles to Tucson, Arizona, our destination and host city for the 29th American Meteorological Society (AMS) Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology (29HURR).

Why drive, you may ask? Why not take a domestic transfer from LAX and be done with the travel? Well, firstly, the travel costs turned out to be collectively cheaper but more importantly (and, to be perfectly honest, this was the overriding motivating factor), we simply could not let the chance to drive and explore a little bit of that American ‘outback’ pass us by. After all, when your PhD supervisor graciously offers to cover the travel expenses of your international conference trip, one can only oblige to try and make the most of this opportunity. Indeed, the plethora of pictures taken of Hollywood and Las Vegas Boulevards, Hoover Dam, the historic Route 66, Meteor Crater, Grand Canyon Caverns and the majestic Grand Canyon National Park itself shared between the four of us are testament to our road odyssey. Moreover, where else but at American gas stations can you buy a bottomless soft drink for $1 (plus tax) or see a tattooed Redneck wearing a cowboy hat coming out of his Chevrolet truck with a pistol strapped to his thigh?

Figure 1: The ‘road trippers’ (and conference attendees) at the Grand Canyon. From left: Angelika Werner, Muhammad Hassim, Simon Caine and Sally Lavender.

Figure 2: Evidence of atmospheric gravity waves at work: lenticular clouds over the Grand Canyon.

Digressions about the perks of travelling to overseas conferences aside, 29HURR was the latest edition in a long series of AMS conferences, held since 1958, that focuses on all aspects of tropical cyclones and tropical meteorology. This year, it took place over 10– 14 May, and the venue chosen for this biennial event was the luxurious J.W. Marriot Starr Pass Resort and Spa. Nestled in the foothills amid the Saguaro cactus forest of Tucson Mountain Park, it made for the perfect setting to take in the scenic views of the Sonoran desert landscape during lunch and tea breaks.

After a long day of ingesting the wide array of interesting talks and some scientific bickering (all in good humour of course), participants had the opportunity to unwind and enjoy the Arizona sunset and evening twilight from the terrace decks overlooking the pool, often with a refreshing beverage in hand in the company of colleagues.

This year, the conference was attended by more than 500 participants, some from as far away as India, Georgia and La Réunion. Some had attended as first-time student volunteers and I’m sure it was as pleasant an experience for them as it was for the presenting participants. Australia was quite well represented too; no less than 13 participants came from various institutions such as the University of Melbourne, Monash University, Macquarie University, Geoscience Australia and the Centre for Australian Weather and

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Climate Research (CAWCR). Most, if not all, were oral presenters although some presented posters as well.

The conference program consisted of four parallel sessions each day. Two formal poster viewing sessions were also organised on the second and fourth afternoons. The topics catered for by the program were wide-ranging and while a large portion of the conference was devoted to tropical cyclone (TC) studies, some sessions were designed around special themes, such as African weather and climate, the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project, the Hurrricane Aerosol and Microphysics Program, among the other “usual suspects” from tropical meteorology including monsoons and convection, convectively-coupled waves and intraseasonal variability. Sessions were also devoted to industry-related applications and the forecasting challenges associated with the extratropical transition of tropical cyclones, as well as specialised field programs conducted in the past few years.

The more popular sessions, in which prominent protagonists of specific fields spoke, attracted huge crowds. It wasn’t therefore surprising to see opposing opinions presented, argued and counter-argued during these exchanges. Furthermore, healthy and constructive comments/debates were often not only witnessed at the end of these sessions, but sometimes during the talks themselves. In fact, one of the more memorable moments of conference occurred when Greg Holland (NCAR) was presenting in a session about TCs and climate controls on extreme events. As he spoke, a comment was thrown from the floor to the tune of “Greg, you are talking gobbledee-gook!”. It came from none other than William M. “Bill” Gray of Colorado State University, a pioneering expert on seasonal hurricane forecasting for the North Atlantic but a noted skeptic of anthropogenic global warming.

As a mark of respect to a departed colleague, a special evening session was also held on the first night to honour the distinguished life and work of the late Joanne Simpson (d. March 2010). She was born Joanne Malkus, of the seminal Riehl and Malkus 1958 paper, which postulated the role of convective ‘hot towers’ on the heat balance of the tropical atmosphere.

Dr Simpson was the first woman to ever receive a PhD in meteorology and later went on to become a pioneering giant in the field of tropical meteorology and tropical cyclones.

Reflections on the life and science of Joanne Simpson were an appropriate tribute.

Figure 3: Conference dinner banquet As usual for any conference, there was some serious science being presented, deliberated and discussed. However, the conference organisers also scheduled several evening events so that participants could mingle, network and interact in a more social atmosphere. Local Mexican cuisine was on the menu for the conference banquet, the highlight of which included several numbers by a Native American Indian tribal dance group, resplendently dressed in colourful robes adorned with eagle feathers. Shuttle buses were also organised on alternate evenings to ferry participants into Tucson city itself, where we could sample more of the local Mexican/American/Asian cuisine on offer for dinner. Coincidentally, it happened to be college graduation week in Arizona, and so the university precinct and nearby streets were buzzing with graduands, their parents and friends, with seat availability in recommended food joints at a premium.

As the conference drew to a close, it can be said that 29HURR succeeded in delivering what it had intended to do, and that was to “provide for a scientifically stimulating and professionally rewarding experience”. As a platform for sharing ideas and stimulating new discourses in this important aspect of atmospheric science, one can only agree.

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News from the Centres Andrew Tupper talks volcanoes at the Melbourne Centre Around 30 members of the AMOS Melbourne Centre met at the Bureau of Meteorology office to hear Andrew Tupper from the Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre speak on the evening of Thursday May 14.

In an interesting and engaging presentation, Dr Tupper explored the current procedures around the aviation industry and volcanic ash safety.

He opened with a little audience participation, and taught everyone in the audience how to pronounce the infamous Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull (for the record is it pronounced “ay-uh-fyat-luh-yoe-kuutl-ul”).

Dr Tupper then proceeded to run through some of history’s most dramatic incidents involving airplanes and volcanic ash. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) developed a severity index for these ash cloud-aircraft encounters in 2001 which ranges from 0 to 5.

Class 0 represents a very weak encounter,

where St Elmo’s fire is seen on the windshield, or a smell of sulphur in the cabin is detected, while Class 5 means engine failure, ultimately resulting in a crash.

Miraculously, there have not been any Class 5 encounters recorded, although there have been several Class 4 incidents involving plane engines that have died, but restarted just in time. Dr Tupper showed that there is a higher concentration of encounters in the sky about Asia due to the higher density of active volcanoes. When the number of encounters peaked in 1991 thanks to the Mt Pinatubo eruption, it was decided that a warning system was required.

Using many images and examples, Dr Tupper spoke about just how difficult it is to produce an effective and accurate global warning system. Volcanic ash doesn’t disappear, he explained, it simply dissipates. So when is the concentration of ash in the atmosphere low enough for it to be safe for planes? And how do we tell? Each volcano expels a unique ash cloud, and while some volcanoes are very well monitored, others, such as the ones located in developing countries, are not well observed by land or satellite based techniques.

While Dr Tupper stressed the severity of the Icelandic volcano situation, he also suggested that a lot of very good data would come from the eruption, which might make the development of a more effective warning system, and safety threshold, easier.

Andrew Tupper addresses the audience at the Bureau of Meterology last month.

The seminar was very well received, with several thought provoking questions being asked at the conclusion of the talk and almost all of the nibbles being eaten! Many thanks to Dr Tupper for such an insightful presentation and thanks also to Drs Blair Trewin and Vaughan Barras for organizing and running the evening.

Further information: http://www.bom.gov.au/info/vaac/

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Meet a Member Every issue, an AMOS member is selected at random and emailed some questions about who they are and what they do. This issue we meet Dr Fiona Evans.

Where does this email find you?

At my desk at the CSIRO Centre for Environment and Life Sciences in Floreat, WA. What do you do?

I’m working for the Department of Agriculture and Food Western Australia (DAFWA) on the development of statistical methods for forecasting seasonal rainfall for southwest WA (SWWA).

Why did you get into it?

After completing a Bachelor of Science in mathematics and statistics with honours in 1993, I began my career with CSIRO Mathematics and Information Sciences where I developed methods for integrating remotely sensed and other spatial data for monitoring and predicting dryland salinity. While with CSIRO, I completed a Masters on machine learning techniques (decision trees, neural networks and Bayesian networks) and began my PhD on syntactic pattern recognition (applied statistics). I was transferred to Brisbane in 2005 to apply modern statistical techniques to fishery stock assessment. But I wanted to be closer to my family and friends, so I took a position with DAFWA where I developed simulation models for the spread of

herbicide resistance in agricultural weed populations. The WA government recognises the strong need for better seasonal forecasts in WA and in late 2008, I embarked on a new career in meteorology, applying my statistical skills to seasonal forecasting for SWWA. What is the best thing about what you do?

Knowing that the work I do is needed, highly valued and can have a huge impact on individual farmers and on agriculture in WA. What did you want to be when you were 10?

Well, I never thought I’d be a mathematician!

But I did get hooked on maths at quite a young age. Because I would finish my work before all the other kids, I was a disruptive influence in my year six class in primary school. My teacher gave me a book of mathematical puzzles, and when I’d finished my work I was allowed to take it to the library and work through it at my own pace. I loved it and I still love solving puzzles – even the really big ones like “will it be a good season this year?”

How do you relax?

I’ve been learning the Japanese martial art Aikido for eleven years, so when I get stressed I throw people around for an hour or two. I also enjoy language – both reading and writing.

What is your favourite holiday destination?

Anywhere new or where people I love are living.

Fiona Evans in her office at CSIRO Centre for Environment and Life Sciences in Floreat, WA.

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Articles Southern Hemisphere regional precipitation and climate variability: Extremes, trends, and prediction Caroline C. Ummenhofer Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales Address for correspondence: C.Ummenhofer@unsw.edu.au (This article is a summary of Caroline Ummenhofer’s PhD thesis, which was awarded the Uwe Radok Award for best thesis at the 2010 AMOS Conference – Ed.) This PhD thesis investigates the relative importance of oceanic and atmospheric influences on extremes, long-term trends, and seasonal to interannual variability of precipitation for different regions in the Southern Hemisphere (SH) using observations, reanalysis data, and output from general circulation models.

reminiscent of a tropical Indian Ocean dipole (IOD) event are observed. Ensemble simulations with an AGCM are used to understand the relative effect of local and large-scale Indian Ocean SST anomalies (cf.

Figure 2) on above-average East African precipitation. The importance of the various tropical and subtropical IOD SST poles, both individually and in combination, is quantified (Ummenhofer et al. 2009b). Enhanced East African “short rains” are predominantly driven by the local warm SST anomalies in the western equatorial Indian Ocean (Figure 3).

Southwest Western Australia Examination of interannual rainfall extremes over southwest Western Australia (SWWA) reveals a characteristic dipole pattern of Indian Ocean sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies, with features of both the tropical and subtropical Indian Ocean dipoles (England et al. 2006). This coincides with a large-scale reorganisation of the wind field over the tropical/subtropical Indian Ocean and changing SST anomalies, via anomalous Ekman transport in the tropical Indian Ocean and anomalous air-sea heat fluxes in the subtropics (Figure 1). These changes modify the advection of moisture onto SWWA. The potential impact of these Indian Ocean SST anomalies in modulating mid-latitude precipitation across southern and western regions of Australia is assessed in atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM) simulations (Figure 2). The SST anomalies give rise to changes in the thermal properties of the overlying atmosphere, meridional thickness gradient, subtropical jet, thermal wind, moisture advection, and baroclinicity over southern regions of Australia, thus modulating precipitation (Ummenhofer et al.

2008).

East Africa Links between extreme wet conditions over East Africa and Indian Ocean SST are investigated during the core of the so-called “short rain” season in October–November.

During periods of enhanced East African rainfall, Indian Ocean SST anomalies

Figure 1: Schematic diagram showing the connection between Indian Ocean climate variability and (a) dry and (b) wet years over SWWA. SST anomalies are shown colour shaded. Wind anomalies are shown schematically as bold arrows, pressure anomalies are indicated by H (high) and L (low), and rainfall anomalies are shown using sun/cloud symbols.

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The changed East African rainfall distribution can be explained by a reorganisation of the atmospheric circulation leading to increased onshore moisture advection induced by the SST anomalies, consistent with an anomalous strengthening of the Walker cell.

New Zealand Interannual extremes in New Zealand rainfall and their modulation by modes of SH climate variability, namely the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) and El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), are investigated (Ummenhofer & England 2007). Late twentieth Century trends in New Zealand precipitation are examined for the period 19792006 to quantify the impact of long-term changes in the large-scale atmospheric circulation. Increasingly drier conditions over much of New Zealand are found to be tied to changes in the SAM and ENSO (Ummenhofer et al. 2009a).

Figure 3: Frequency distribution of precipitation across East Africa: rainfall amount (mm) summed for the months Oct.– Nov. for the “poles” experiments indicated in Figure 2. The shaded grey rainfall distribution represents the control, while the perturbed cases are indicated with black outlines.

Southeastern Australia Cool season rainfall variability in southeastern Australia is investigated via a classification and characterisation of the predominant types of synoptic systems occurring in the region, focusing on frontal and cutoff low systems (Risbey et al. 2009). Two definitions of the autumn break developed for northwestern Victoria are employed to produce a synoptic climatology of the break phenomenon. Trends in characteristics of the autumn break indicate that the most recent drought in southeastern Australia is comparable in severity with the two major droughts in the twentieth Century (Pook et al. 2009).

Figure 2: Schematic of Indian Ocean SST anomalies on rainfall in Indian Ocean rim countries in AGCM simulations for different seasons. The SST anomalies (°C) are shown as average over the March-Nov. months. Specific regions (“poles”) of SST anomalies are employed in the AGCM experiments, with the poles indicated by the dashed boxes. The anomalous rainfall associated with these regions of SST anomalies is shown by circles around the Indian Ocean rim countries. Filled (empty) circles denote an increase (decrease) in precipitation (as % change), with the size of the circle reflecting the magnitude of change and the colour the season.

References England, M.H., Ummenhofer, C.C. and Santoso, A. (2006). Interannual rainfall extremes over southwest Western Australia linked to Indian Ocean climate variability. J. Clim., 19, 1948-1969.

Pook, M., Lisson, S., Risbey J., Ummenhofer, C.C., McIntosh, P. and Rebbeck, M. (2009).

The autumn break for cropping in Southeast Australia: trends, synoptic influences and impacts on yields. Int. J. Climatol., 29, 20122026.

Risbey, J.S., Pook, M.J., McIntosh, P.C., Ummenhofer, C.C. and Meyers, G. (2009).

Characteristics and variability of synoptic

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features associated with cool season rainfall in southeastern Australia. Int. J. Climatol., 29, 1595-1613.

Ummenhofer, C.C. and England M.H. (2007).

Interannual extremes in New Zealand precipitation linked to modes of SH climate variability. J. Clim., 20, 5418-5440.

Ummenhofer, C.C., Sen Gupta. A. and England, M.H. (2009a). Causes of late twentieth Century New Zealand precipitation trends. J. Clim., 22, 3-19.

Ummenhofer, C.C., Sen Gupta, A., England M.H. and Reason C.J.C. (2009b).

Contributions of Indian Ocean sea surface temperatures to enhanced East African rainfall.

J. Clim., 22, 993-1013.

Ummenhofer, C.C., Sen Gupta, A., Pook, M.J. and England M.H. (2008). Anomalous rainfall over southwest Western Australia forced by Indian Ocean sea surface temperatures. J. Clim., 21, 5113-5.

A retrospective of my years in the Bureau 1959-2009 Bob Seaman The Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, recently retired Address for correspondence: r.seaman@live.com.au Abstract

4.

1969 to 1984, in the joint Bureau-CSIRO research organisation, the Commonwealth Meteorology Research Centre (CMRC), subsequently renamed the Australian Numerical Meteorology Research Centre (ANMRC);

5.

1985 to 2006, the Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre (BMRC), no longer a joint centre, but solely part of the Bureau empire; and

6.

2007 to the present, in the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research (CAWCR), once again a joint BureauCSIRO research organisation.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” – L.P. Hartley I shall cover the period from 1959 to 2009, from the perspective of where I was in the Bureau at the time. There won’t be much detailed science, and I promise no equations or fancy graphics. I shall mention a few of the people I have met along the way who have influenced me substantially. I shall also try to summarise some of the lessons I have learnt.

Introduction When I was invited to give a departing seminar, I was given the liberty to talk about whatever I wanted. I decided I would try to say at least a bit about each of the significant periods in my time with the Bureau. I would also say something about what I learnt from each of those periods.

For much of my 50 years I have worked in an applied research environment. But this will only be about research in a very general sense.

I’ll cover what most readily springs to mind about each period, so it will definitely be selective.

It is convenient to split the 50 years 1959 to 2009 into six segments; not equal segments, but each a distinctly different phase. They are: 1.

1959, at the Bureau’s Training School;

2.

1960 to 1965, at the South Australian Regional Office;

3.

1966 to 1969, in the Bureau’s Head Office Research Branch;

For these six periods, I have asked myself the following questions: •

What do I remember most about that period?

•

What did I learn during that period, that I found most useful?

1. 1959: Training School So to the first period: the Bureau’s Training School in 1959.

The one thing I remember most about the training school itself is that, not to mince words, it was a real dump. It was a dilapidated building, located on the corner block of Exhibition and Little Lonsdale Streets, near where the Coopers Inn now stands. If the Training School building stood today, it would never be allowed to be occupied for health and safety reasons. Its plumbing and toilet facilities, and fire safety standards were, to say the least, well below today’s accepted standards. Not that the building was much worse or better than its neighbours. For those

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of you unaware of Melbourne’s history, Little Lonsdale Street was still a distinctly down market part of town in 1959. The view from the training school was over an automotive junkyard. All it needed was the junkyard dog to complete the picture.

But I must keep things in perspective.

According to The Weather Watchers, David Day’s great book on the history of the Bureau, it would seem that the general quality of accommodation the Bureau provided to many of its staff back in the 1950s wasn’t exactly luxurious anyway. Indeed, it wasn’t until the 1980s that most of the Bureau’s Head Office was located in the one building. Comparatively speaking at least, we now have it pretty good at 700 Collins Street.

The meteorologist training course of 1959 started out with four trainees. We lost one, for health reasons, before the course finished. I won’t blame the awful accommodation for his deterioration in health, but you never know.

We lost a second member to the so-called hippie sub-culture, within a couple of years.

The Bureau didn’t have quite the same enlightened attitude to cultural diversity then as it has today. But two of us, John Brown, formerly of the National Meteorological and Oceanographic Centre (NMOC), and I survived to fight another day.

But what about the training course itself? What did I learn on the training course that best served me in subsequent years?

This may come as a surprise to some, but it wasn’t anything specifically about either the science of meteorology or about the practice of forecasting that I most remember. It was a course of lectures, ostensibly on statistics, by one of the training course lecturers, Kevin Spillane. Kevin was to become famous in the future for the so-called “Spillane Eddy”, which is a feature of the low-level wind climate in the Melbourne area.

Anyway, Kevin Spillane’s statistics course, if you go by the course notes, was not what I would consider particularly outstanding. It was basically a lot of the stuff you would probably get in Statistics 101 these days. What did make the lectures memorable was Kevin’s lecturing style. He used to start off following the notes, but was easily diverted into recounting his experience and advice about a variety of only loosely related matters. Kevin had an encyclopaedic knowledge, or so it seemed to me, about an enormous range of things meteorological and statistical. I certainly learnt more from Kevin’s digressions than from what was supposed to be the course content.

One of Kevin’s digressions helped me greatly in what was to be one of my future roles as a reviewer, and occasional editor of scientific papers and publications. Kevin wandered off from basic statistics, into the area of time series analysis, and introduced us to the socalled Slutsky-Yule effect. I won’t describe the Slutsky-Yule effect in detail (search the internet for it if you’re really interested).

Suffice to say that the neglect of the SlutskyYule effect has resulted in much nonsense being written about meteorological time series, sometimes by authors whom I thought would have known better. Kevin Spillane’s digressions on that course fifty years ago has helped me to detect and rectify just a few of these cases. Thanks, Kevin.

I’ll wrap up this discussion of the training school days with a quote attributed to Lord Kelvin, which I read in the introduction to one of the course textbooks, and forced myself to remember, and sometimes act upon in future years.

“When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind” – Lord Kelvin (1883)

2. 1960–1956: South Australian Regional Office.

Now let’s move on to the period from 1960 to 1965, in the South Australian Regional Office.

What do I remember most about that period?

The answer is easy: Doc Hogan. The Doc was so named for his reputed expertise in caring for injured wildlife. He was the Regional Director in South Australia during the period I was there. From a Bureau-wide perspective, you can judge Doc Hogan’s place in Bureau history from the many times he is mentioned in David Day’s book. I would describe the Doc as a superb pragmatist, from whom I learned a great deal about the practical aspects of day-today weather forecasting.

I particularly remember a printed list above the forecast bench, entitled “Hints to Forecasters”.

This was a collection of twenty or so simple practical rules, based upon synoptic experience. One needed to have a good reason before disregarding any of these “Hints to Forecasters”. I often wonder if they still exist, and whether anyone has ever evaluated them quantitatively. A future boss Brian Tucker, who will feature later, characterised the Bureau culture around this time as “doctrinaire pragmatism”. I think “Hints to Forecasters” was the sort of thing he had in mind.

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Doc Hogan was a hands-on manager. He was frequently to be found close to the forecast bench. I, and others, often disagreed with him on meteorological matters, and he would seldom concede that he was wrong. Sometimes I think he just liked to have young forecasters argue with him, and would take different sides of an argument depending on whom he was talking to. Truly a memorable character!

But apart from learning to cope better with abrasive and strongly opinionated people (which is probably not a bad skill to have anyway), what else did I learn in the South Australian Office that served me well in later years?

I owe a great deal to the influence of Ross Maine, who was a forecaster during the first few years I was in Adelaide. Ross was to become, as future Director John Zillman was to describe him, “the father of Bureau computing”. But that was all in the future then.

I remember Ross as a person who, while working as a forecaster, was always trying out quantitative numerical and statistical methods to apply to practical forecasting problems. This was a rare quality in the early 1960s. I think it was Ross’ attitude to meteorology, along with Kevin Spillane’s lectures and digressions on the met course, that reinforced in my mind the words of Lord Kelvin about the need to think quantitatively.

3. 1966–1969: Bureau’s Research Branch in Head Office.

In hindsight, it was just about inevitable that I should eventually move to the Bureau’s Research Branch in Head Office. This was 1966. The Research Branch was headed by the entrepreneurial Brian Tucker, who had been recently recruited from the United Kingdom Met Office. Why was I selected? I learnt later that an important factor in my selection by Brian Tucker for the Research Branch of the Bureau was the fact that while in South Australia, I had written up a couple of internal technical reports. These reports followed up on some of Ross Maine’s work on objective aids to forecasting. Looking back on those reports now, with a referee’s eye, they were pretty unremarkable. But at least they were written simply and clearly, and were scientifically sound, without obvious errors. A start, I guess!

If there is a lesson in all of this, I suppose, it is probably that I had at least made an effort to do some personal research, and write it up, which wasn’t all that common for forecasters in the regions then (it may be different now).

My main task in the Bureau’s Research Branch was to be a member of a team led by Ross Maine. The team also included Doug Gauntlett (recently retired as Deputy Director), and David Hincksman (recently retired from the Bureau’s IT side). This team was tasked to implement the Bureau’s first numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. My own particular area was to be the so-called objective analysis, later to become known as data assimilation.

What I remember most about my time in the Bureau’s Research Branch is again, perhaps surprisingly, not really anything meteorological, and only indirectly scientific.

It was, however, not only what I remember most, but also, from a long-term perspective, something that served me well in the future.

When I reached Head Office, one of the first people I came into contact with, was Neil McRae. “Mac”, as he was known, like Doc Hogan in Adelaide, is mentioned many times in David Day’s history of the Bureau. In 1966, Neil McRae was a very senior scientist in the Bureau’s Research Branch. In terms of his background before joining the Bureau, “Mac” was a Master of Arts in Mathematics, and had won Melbourne University’s Gold Medal for Mathematics some time back in the 1930s.

Then, soon after joining the Bureau during World War 2, he was in charge of the Meteorological Office in Darwin during the Japanese bombing raids – quite a background!

But what I remember “Mac” for, in 1966, was his expertise in applied probability; he had a deserved reputation as a skilful punter on horseracing. As I, too, was sometimes to be found at Melbourne racecourses or the TAB at that time, we had an interest in common. This common interest led to my increasing awareness of Bayes’ Theorem in probability.

Certainly in 1966, Bayes’ Theorem was (and probably still is) not well known in the meteorological community. Search it online if you want to know more! It was only over the years that I came to realise how Bayes’ Theorem was also applicable, and indeed almost fundamental, in meteorological data assimilation. This is surely an example of how one should always be alert for the opportunity to apply lessons learnt in one field, possibly unrelated to one’s day-to-day work, to one’s major task in life.

I had only been in the Bureau’s Research Branch for a couple of years when in 1969 an event occurred that was to shape research in the Bureau for the next couple of decades. This was the government decision to set up a joint

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Bureau-CSIRO research centre, the Commonwealth Meteorology Research Centre, or CMRC. In fact, after about another five years, CMRC became ANMRC (Australian Numerical Meteorology Research Centre), but I shall deal with the entire period, 1969 to 1984, as the CMRC-ANMRC period.

4. 1969–1984. CMRC-ANMRC What I remember most about the CMRCANMRC period is easy. It has to be what I will call the “ongoing war at the top”. To put all of this into context, let me explain CMRCANMRC’s task in life. Its driving force, if I can put it that way, was the advent of NWP. The charter of CMRC, briefly, was to perform weather and climate research, with emphasis on numerical modelling of the atmosphere.

This included the development of numerical prediction models for operational use by the Bureau. Moreover, the CMRC would absorb those Bureau people (myself included) who were already engaged in numerical prediction model development. The inaugural head of CMRC was to be Brian Tucker, who was by now a CSIRO officer. In other words, the Bureau people in the new CMRC (as it was then) would be responsible to the head of CMRC, who was a CSIRO officer. CMRC rather than the Bureau would be responsible for numerical prediction model development.

It would be an understatement to say that the Bureau hierarchy did not take kindly to the Government decision to set up the CMRC. The Bureau hierarchy, and Bureau Director Bill Gibbs in particular, saw it, with considerable justification as I would acknowledge, as a diminution of the Bureau’s resources and influence. One of my colleagues, whom I won’t embarrass now by naming, got it right when he described the tension between the Bureau and the CSIRO as being mainly about “who had the most marbles”. That schoolyard analogy is accurate in more ways than one.

Anyway, enough has been said and written already about the institutional tensions between the Bureau and the CSIRO during this period, without me going on about it any more.

Anyone who is really interested in the institutional politics can read John Gardner’s Master’s thesis written in 1993, or the Bureau publication, Metarch Number 15, authored by myself in 2004. But I must say I don’t think the conflict at the top made too much difference at the day-to-day level of the working scientist. While in CMRC I always worked amicably with Bureau colleagues at the same level. But my Bureau colleagues and I were both only too well aware of the tensions

at the top. Those tensions would eventually lead to CMRC-ANMRC’s demise. I’ll be saying a bit more about CMRC later, when I come to compare CMRC as it was in the 1970s, with CAWCR as it is now.

But to keep things in chronological order, let me move on to the second question I ask about the CMRC-ANMRC period. What did I learn that best served me in the future? Since 1969 to 1984 is a rather long period, I’m spending more time on it, than I do on other periods.

One of my major influences as a researcher, in the original years of CMRC, was a person of whom many of you have probably never heard.

He didn’t publish much in the open literature, and was probably more of a software engineer than a researcher himself. The person in question was Dr Manfred Holl. He was the principal of a meteorological consulting company known as Meteorology International Inc., based in Monterey in the United States.

He and his colleagues had developed a method of data assimilation, which they called information blending. It was based on the calculus of variations, and to this extent was related to more sophisticated methods to come much later. Its basic philosophy was to combine information about patterns, with information about absolute values.

I found that the philosophy of information blending was very readily adapted to our task here in Australia. At that time, around 1970, we relied much more than we do now upon interpretations of satellite imagery (or cloud patterns), from which a meteorological analyst derived patterns of fields such as sea level pressure. To make use of the skills of the human meteorologist in NWP, we needed to blend these patterns from cloud pictures, with absolute values of pressure from observing platforms such a ships, buoys and island stations. Now, Manfred Holl hadn’t derived his information blending method with the Bureau’s needs in mind; in fact he used it in oceanographic applications for the United States Navy. But with Manfred Holl’s very well articulated explanation of his basic philosophy, namely combining patterns with absolute values, I realised it was just the sort of thing that might help us here. And so it turned out to be.

I think this story underlines the importance of trying to understand basic ideas, rather than all the technical detail, and to look out for opportunities to think laterally. There’s probably a lesson here too for authors of papers. It may be wise to make at least parts of your paper overly simple. Don’t leave things

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out just because you think they are obvious.

Keep the likely readership in mind. I think in the case of Manfred Holl’s work, his simple “explanation for dummies”, to use a current idiom, was what helped me realise its potential for Australia. The saying “keep it simple, stupid” does have something going for it.

pragmatists”, nor did university academics appreciate being typecast as “dilettantes”. The talk, which as I said was meant to be somewhat satirical, is well worth a read even now, although I think the article in Weather has been toned down a bit for diplomatic reasons.

A second and perhaps more important recollection of the CMRC-ANMRC period is in the nature of a tribute to the scientist whose work has probably influenced me more than anyone else’s work has. This was Professor Lev Gandin. In the early 1960s Gandin wrote a book entitled Objective analysis of meteorological fields. It was not translated into English from the original Russian until the mid-1960s, and I only became aware of it in the late 1960s.

Now, to the end of the CMRC-ANMRC era, which came in 1985. The events leading to the Bureau “winning the war”, so to speak, have already been written about enough. Any one who is really interested can read my version of what happened in Metarch Number 15, that the Bureau was kind enough to publish. So the Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre, almost always called simply BMRC, came into existence in 1985, with the Bureau now having a full mandate to develop NWP models, and indeed having a wider research mandate than CMRC-ANMRC ever had. So now we move to the BMRC period.

Gandin’s book is an example of work that was well ahead of its time. Among many other things, it set out the theory and principles underlying the data assimilation method that became known as statistical, or optimum, interpolation. More than a decade passed after the publication of Gandin’s book before computing power increased sufficiently to enable its effective application. But then, during the 1980s, it was adopted by most operational centres throughout the world, and at many centres was used well into the 1990s.

I’ll have cause to mention Gandin’s work again in a little while. It has most certainly been a major influence on several aspects of my own work.

Still on the CMRC-ANMRC days, I really must mention a talk given by Brian Tucker that sticks in my memory. As I mentioned before, Brian was the first head of CMRC, but he gave this talk in 1972, on the occasion of his departure from CMRC to become Chief of CSIRO Atmospheric Research at Aspendale.

The talk was published later in the Royal Meteorological Society journal Weather. It was entitled “Research and services: differing attitudes within the science of meteorology”. It highlighted examples of the two attitudes typifying what Brian called “research” and “service” attitudes to meteorology. Its point was to contrast attitudes in service institutions, like the Bureau on the one hand, and in research institutions, like CSIRO, as it was then, and academia on the other hand. Brian’s presentation anticipated by many years the TV series, “Yes, Minister”. I thought it was a great talk that he gave. But I don’t think everyone attending the talk saw it quite the same way as I did. In particular, I don’t think the Bureau’s director, Bill Gibbs, appreciated Bureau meteorologists being typecast as “doctrinaire

5. 1985–2006: BMRC What do I remember most about 1985 to 2006, the period of BMRC’s existence? Firstly, its start. The Bureau had won the war. But despite the fears of some, and here I must include myself, the transition back to the Bureau control, for those of us on the NWP side, was really quite seamless. This reflects credit on the Bureau, its Director John Zillman (Bill Gibbs having by now retired), and in particular upon the Bureau’s Deputy Director Doug Gauntlett. Doug was a Chief of ANMRC in his previous life, and was only too aware of the importance of maintaining the core of numerical weather prediction expertise that existed in CMRC and ANMRC. Most of the CSIRO research scientists from the former ANMRC who were engaged in numerical weather prediction accepted similar positions in BMRC. This was a good start.

From a personal perspective, what else do I remember about my time in BMRC? As time went by, in my work on data assimilation, I became more and more aware of the stature of Lev Gandin’s monumental work written some twenty years earlier. More and more numerical weather prediction centres throughout the world adopted Gandin’s statistical interpolation as their preferred method of data assimilation. We did so here in Australia as well. But during the time of BMRC, I also came to realise, more and more, how Gandin’s work on statistical theory could be used for other applications, too. You will realise from all of this that I’m one of Gandin’s greatest fans!

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Some of you will know that Gandin himself became well and truly offside with the Soviet Union authorities when he sought to emigrate to Israel in the 1980s. He eventually ended up with the United States National Meteorological Centre, where I had the honour of meeting him.

One very important application of Gandin’s work I found was in the assessment of observational networks. One of my interests then, and still now, is the question of which are the most important observations? My interest in this subject goes back a long way. I’m sure my colleague Mike Coughlan will remember when we were both on a committee back in the early 1980s. Our task was to consider the future of some of Australia’s remote upper air stations, which both then and now are quite expensive to maintain. We had to take a particularly close look at Giles, Oodnadatta and Willis Island. Giles and Willis Island survive to this day; but unfortunately Oodnadatta does not survive as an upper air station.

But once the Bureau adopted statistical interpolation as its preferred method of data assimilation in the mid-1980s, it became possible, using Gandin’s statistical interpolation theory, to routinely calculate the impact of every observation station. In fact, we have been doing this since the early 1990s.

And we have found that, of all the upper air stations in the Australian network, one that is consistently among the most influential is Giles. So, if you are even thinking about removing any station from our upper air network, just about the last one you would remove would be Giles. I repeat, the study of the impact of observations is an application underpinned by Gandin’s original work.

A second application of Gandin’s statistical theory is in the important area of quality control. I have made use of his theory in this area, too. Gandin’s statistical interpolation theory is ready made for the process known as cross-validation, whereby one can assess how well one observation agrees with its neighbours. That is, one can check for spatial consistency, and in this way detect both oneoff large errors, and also smaller but systematic errors.

Now, back to a broader perspective. You will have realised by now that I’m a rather quantitative sort of person, a fan of Lord Kelvin, whom I quoted earlier. I guess many people in meteorology are similar. I often read popularly written mathematical and statistical stuff that’s not about meteorology. Much of it

had no relevance whatsoever to my day-to-day work. But occasionally, you can hit the jackpot, as I did once a few years ago.

Now is the time to give a free plug to a little magazine called Chance, published by the American Statistical Association. I use the description “magazine”, rather than “journal”, advisedly. It’s written informally, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. For those of you with long memories, I would liken the style of Chance, in statistics, to that of a long departed Australian politically oriented weekly, Nation Review, in politics.

Anyway, the particular article that caught my eye in Chance was about what is known as Benford’s Law. The easiest way to explain Benford’s Law is to suggest an experiment any of you can do after this talk. Grab a copy of today’s newspaper, any one of them, and turn to the share market prices. Make a count of how many prices start with the number 1, ignoring leading zeroes. For example the share prices 15.5 cents, 10814 cents, and 0.0175 cents, would all count as starting with 1. Then do the same for prices starting with 2, then those starting with 3, and so on down to 9. You will probably find many more prices start with 1, than start with 2, more start with 2 than with 3, and so on. If you did this for many days, you would find that about 30% of numbers started with 1, but only about 5% start with 9.

It turns out that there are quite a number of types of real life data that behave like this, and obey Benford’s Law. One example, from sport, is the batting scores of cricketers. Another example, from everyday life, is numbers in honest tax return data.

To cut a long story short, I read this article about Benford’s Law in this little magazine Chance, and got an idea about how to use Benford’s Law in my work in data assimilation. I tried it out, and it seemed to work ok. When I came to write up this work for publication, I realised that the work might be considered a bit out of left field, and I was quite prepared to see the paper knocked back.

But amazingly, one of the reviewers, I still don’t know who, gave it the sort of positive review I have not received before or since, in my 50 years with the Bureau. In fact, if one of my colleagues had shown me a review that he claimed to have received like this one, I would have accused him of getting his mum to write it! Seriously though, I think the message of this experience with Benford’s Law is to read widely, and always stay alert for opportunities.

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6. 2007 – present: CAWCR Now to the final period, from 2007 to the present: the life of CAWCR. To put things in perspective, I have either been on long service leave, or working part time, for most of CAWCR’s existence so far.

Several people remarked to me when CAWCR was established that it was a case of history repeating itself, referring of course to the joint Bureau-CSIRO venture of CMRC-ANMRC during the years 1969 to 1984. And I made the knee-jerk, “smart alec”, response about those who fail to heed the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. But this was a superficial and unfair response, which I now regret. A far more appropriate response would have been that of the Greek philosopher, Heraclitos.

You can never step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing in.” – Heraclitos Anyway, it’s worth thinking about some of the more obvious differences between CAWCR now, still close to its outset, and CMRC, when it was close to its outset, say around 1970. The most obvious difference is one of scale. Simply doing a head count, CAWCR has about 300 people, while CMRC at the same stage had about 30. CAWCR is spread over several geographic locations. CMRC people were all in the one place. Of course, CAWCR has many more tasks in life than CMRC ever did, too. I simply note the point that scale is the real elephant in the room.

Reminiscing very much from a personal perspective, as a Bureau meteorologist I found it to be one of CMRC’s greatest strengths in the 1970s, to be working alongside CSIRO research scientists (often in the same group and the next office). In CMRC, the “jointness” of the joint organisation extended very much to the day-to-day practical level, to the very grass roots.

It was not simply at a management level: much of my interaction with CSIRO people as they were then, like Bill Bourke and Lance Leslie, was very much at this detailed practical level.

Indeed, the day-to-day meteorologist and research scientist interaction was one of the explicit rationales for CMRC’s establishment in 1969 in the first place, as CSIRO’s Dr Bill Priestley said publicly on many occasions. Such interactions are obviously easier to achieve with 30-odd people in the same building, than

with 300-odd people in different states. I’m sure that CAWCR people know this, and already deal with the practicality of scale as best they can. I realise too, that the rationale for CAWCR’s establishment is a lot different from what it was for CMRC, so it’s no surprise that the interactions between Bureau and CSIRO people are likewise different in CAWCR than they were in CMRC. I simply make the observation.

But I now move on to a second major difference between CAWCR, now, and CMRC then. This is probably a more important one and is certainly a factor operating in CAWCR’s favour now, compared with CMRC in its early days. It stems from the origins of the two. The establishment of CMRC, by government edict, tended to exacerbate historic tensions between the Bureau and CSIRO. In my view anyway, it was these very tensions that in the end contributed to CMRC-ANMRC’s demise.

The origins of CAWCR are very different.

CAWCR began as an initiative of top management of the Bureau and CSIRO themselves, and is seen by both institutions as being to their mutual benefit. So CAWCR has this factor going for it from the outset. I’ve been throwing quotes around rather liberally, so I should give one from Niels Bohr, who said “prediction is difficult, particularly the future”.

This is the case here too, but CAWCR has made a good start.

Conclusion I’m getting near the end now and I should try my best to condense a take-home message.

Bear in mind please, that this is coming from a person who has worked mostly in an applied research environment. Everyone is different, and I can only say what has worked for me.

With this disclaimer, here goes.

That advice is to read and listen widely in fields you are interested in, including those far removed from your bread and butter tasks in life. I think that this may apply particularly now to CAWCR with its wide range of people, much wider than CMRC ever had. Try to understand underlying ideas and philosophies, rather than specific details. But at the same time, stay alert for opportunities to apply what you read and hear to your everyday work. “Be inquisitive and opportunistic”, maybe one way of condensing this advice further. I hope it helps!

I’ll finish there.

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References Day, D. (2007). The Weather Watchers.

Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.

530pp.

Gardner, J. (1993). Stormy weather: a history of the Bureau of Meteorology. Master’s Thesis, The University of Melbourne. 80pp.

Gondin, L.S. (1963). Objective analysis of meteorological fields.

Gidrometeorologicheskoe Izdate’stro, Leningrad, USSR. 286pp.

Seaman, B. (2004). ANMRC – victim of institutional politics? Metarch Papers, No. 15.

Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne. 29pp.

Tucker, G.B. (1976). Research and services: differing attitudes with in the sciences of meteorology. Weather, 4, 104-112.

Significant Mesoscale Oceanography The romantic practice of dropping a message in a bottle into the ocean for an unknown recipient at an unknown location is seeing a revival, with two recent examples of bottles being found in Australia.

In April, a bottle was found in Port Phillip Bay with a message written in Chinese and speculated origins in the South China Sea (Figure 1). The journey on this occasion was so unusual that it was reported in both the Channel 9 and Channel 10 evening news. In June, another bottle was found at Portland Victoria as reported by Steve Perkin in the Herald Sun. The origin of this bottle was claimed to be a USA sailor throwing it overboard off Cape Horn. This bottle was presumably transported by the Australian Circumpolar Current (ACC), followed by weaker ocean circulation toward the Great Australian Bight before washing up on the Portland beach. The journey on this occasion took 6 years to complete. Such examples help to remind us of the interconnection of the ocean: water that laps onto our shores can originate from great distances, and the ocean circulation between basins can occur over long periods.

jet comprised of a retroflection and meander, as shown in OceanMAPS behind real time analysis 200 m depth averaged velocity in Figure 2. It resulted from an intense warm core eddy around 250 km east of Sydney and a large cold core eddy around 450 km east of Port Macquarie.

Observations made in the first week of June 2010 show that the seasonal connection between the Leeuwin and South Australian Currents has been established and a welldefined eastward flow from Cape Leeuwin to Bass Strait is present (not shown).

Towards the end of May 2010 the East Australian Current developed a large current Figure 2: Behind real time analysis of 200 m depth averaged velocity for 22 May 2010.

Figure 1: Possible drift pathways from the South China Sea to Southern Australia.

In September 2009, the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico operated by British Petroleum drilled the deepest oil well in history at a depth of approximately 10,680 m.

On the 20th of April 2010 an explosion on the rig killed eleven crew, sunk the semisubmersed platform and initiated the release of large volumes of oil from the well located on the seafloor at around 1260 m depth. Until present, efforts to stem flow have been unsuccessful and it has resulted in an oil spill that is now considered as the largest ever in the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone. At present,

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two relief wells are being drilled that are expected to be completed sometime in August.

The event is a major natural disaster with serious deleterious environmental effects and economic consequences. There has already been a measureable impact on marine wildlife and the full extent and cost of the disaster will not be known for a long time.

In association with a range of real-time oceanographic and meteorological observations being made in the Gulf, two NAVO gliders and two IOOS community gliders are actively sampling in the region.

Daily nowcasts of currents and surface oil density and thickness are being issued by EMS.

Since the beginning of the incident NOAA scientists have been closely observing, analyzing and predicting the transport of surface slicks. Satellite imagery and observations by several NOAA aircraft continue to show narrow bands of oil to the SE and ESE of the main slick. Figure 3 shows the predicted extent of the slick on 10th June 2010.

It is also apparent now that some of the scattered bands have become entrained in a large clockwise eddy that has pinched off the main Loop Current. It is thought that if the sheen persists or has tar balls associated with it, there is potential for some of it to become entrained into the Loop Current and move toward the Florida Straits. A major complicating factor is that the release of oil at the sea floor has led to underwater plumes that are comprised of a mixture of oil, gas and seawater. The extent, transport and future impact on the environment of these plumes is extremely difficult to observe, monitor and predict.

Australia recently experienced the Montara spill off the northwest shelf, and although Deepwater Horizon is unprecedented in scale, character and in the scientific and response effort, it is a learning experience for the kinds of observation, monitoring and prediction capabilities that may be required by the Australian IMOS and BLUElink systems in order to assist in tracking of such events.

Ultimately, reliable information from ocean prediction systems will contribute to the design and operation of safer systems and improved environmental monitoring.

Further information: http://response.restoration.noaa.gov/ http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/ victoria/message-in-a-bottle-foundafter-drifting-at-sea-for-six-years-and12000km/story-e6frf7kx-1225875205184

Figure 3: Surface oil forecast chart for 10th June 2010 for the Deepwater Horizon Spill in the Gulf of Mexico (Source: NOAA).

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Charts From The Past by Blair Trewin 13 May, 1968 Seldom in Australian climatic history has there been as marked a flip-over in conditions as there was in the early months of 1968.

Following on from the severe southeastern drought year of 1967 (the driest on record at Melbourne and Adelaide), early 1968 was also rather dry and very warm in southeastern Australia. Victoria’s maximum temperatures for January-April were the highest on record, and Canberra’s January, February and April daily record highs all date from 1968.

The first substantial break in these warm and dry conditions came with widespread rains during the last week of April, which brought floods in parts of inland Queensland, but the most significant event was in the second week of May. It started with a tropical low off the Kimberley coast on the 8th. The low did not move ashore, but did feed copious moisture into an upper-level low over northern Australia. By the 11th, a surface trough had developed over western Queensland, and extended the next day to run from Mount Isa to Sydney. A strong east coast low then developed in the trough off Sydney on the 13th, and while this moved gradually east, a secondary low formed near Sydney on the 15th, before the system finally moved towards New Zealand on the 16th.

Rains from the system were very widespread, with weekly totals exceeding 50 mm over most of the Northern Territory, NSW, western Queensland and northern Victoria. The heaviest falls, highly unusual for the time of year, were in the NT Top End, particularly on the Tiwi Islands where Milikapiti had three successive three-figure days from the 9th to the 11th and a three-day total of 424 mm. Daily falls in excess of 100 mm also occurred at locations as widespread as Dnieper, near Alice

Springs (158 mm on the 10th), Billapaloota, near Batlow (146 mm on the 11th), Nardoo, north of Mount Isa (242 mm on the 13th) and Crawney in the Upper Hunter (173 mm on the 13th). Further systems later in the month made it Australia’s wettest May on record, with monthly records set over much of the NT, the southern NSW ranges and southwestern Victoria.

The rains exacerbated existing flooding in inland Queensland, with Quiplie having its second highest peak on record, and there was also minor flooding on coastal rivers. An upper-level cold pool on the western flank of the flow brought 5-10 cm snow to the higher parts of the NSW Central and Northern Tablelands, reaching as far north as Stanthorpe in southern Queensland. High winds contributed to two deaths when a boat capsized off Gosford, and widespread power outages in the Sydney region. A separate system off Western Australia brought severe storms to that state, with hail up to 3 cm causing significant damage to market gardens around Perth; the peak daily rainfall was 65 mm at Wagin.

The cold pool, which brought maxima of 4.0°C at Glen Innes and Tenterfield on the 15th, was a prelude to an extended period of cold which would have been notable even in July; Canberra failed to reach 10°C on eight of the fifteen days from 14-28 May. Temperatures were also far below normal across the inland. By the time the month was over, the national maximum temperature anomaly (!3.02°C) was the lowest on record for any month, and state records for May were set in every state except Victoria and Queensland, which both ranked second.

Synoptic chart for 0000 UTC (1000 AEST), 13 May 1968 Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol. 23 page 59

Calendar 2010

24–28 WRCP Open Science Conference, Denver, USA.

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January

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Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Journal.

Vol. 60 No. 1, March 2010.

Articles:

Regular features:

Lucas. On developing a historical fire weather data-set for Australia.

Shaik. The tropical circulation in the Australian and Asian region – May to October 2009.

Fawcett and Stone. A comparison of two seasonal rainfall forecasting systems for Australia.

Thomsen and Smith. Darwin’s mid-evening surge Bettolli, Penalba and Vargas. Synoptic weather types in the south of South America and their relationship to daily rainfall in the core crop-producing region in Argentina.

Siqueira and Marques.

Structural characteristics of mesoscale convective systems over southeast Brazil related to cold frontal and non-frontal incursions.

Jakob. Seasonal climate summary southern hemisphere (winter 2009): a developing El Niño and an exceptionally warm winter for much of Australia.

Wu. Quarterly numerical prediction model performance summary October to December 2009.

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