Bulletin vol 26 no 3 june 2013

AMOS

AustralianMeteorological & OceanographicSociety

Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological & Oceanographic Society Vol 26, No.3, June 2013 ISSN 1035-6576

Contents Editorial ..........................................................................................................................................................................33 President’s Column ........................................................................................................................................................33 News ..............................................................................................................................................................................34 News from the Centres ..................................................................................................................................................36 Conference report ..........................................................................................................................................................36 Articles ...........................................................................................................................................................................38 N. Nicholls — The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): a brief introduction & an “insider” view.............38 M. Tomczak — My working life ............................................................................................................................................44

Meet a Member .............................................................................................................................................................50 Snapshot ........................................................................................................................................................................52 Charts from the Past with Blair Trewin: 20 July 1987 ...................................................................................................53 The Research Corner with Damien Irving: Version control............................................................................................54

ISSN 1035-6576 Cover picture: A rain storm approaches Fraser Island Eastern Beach south of Eurong Beach Resort . The image was taken on 27 April 2013 at 1pm with the photographer facing eastward. Image: Claudia Frauen. 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.

Editorial

Wine harvest and the summer heat Following what has been the hottest summer on record here in Australia, according to the Bureau of Meteorology1, I wondered what impact this would have had (if any) on the 2013 grape harvest now that it has been completed. This is an issue close to my heart as I have visited several of Victoria’s wine regions over the last four years (as well as New Zealand’s) and I hope to visit more across Australia in years to come. So some insight into the impact of this summer’s weather on the harvest might be quite interesting. Heat is an important factor that affects the development and maturing of grapes (Salinger and Porteous, 1988; Tait, 2008). The Tait (2008) study also highlights frost as an important issue in grape development as it can damage the crop severely, particularly in the harvest season when the crop is fully developed. However, the warm conditions led to the harvest beginning earlier than usual in many regions throughout Australia, according to a report from “Wine Grape Growers Australia2”. The higher temperatures also led to an earlier harvest in the Yarra Valley, which suggests that the warm temperatures impacted upon the Victorian grape harvest too3 (Victoria was not mentioned in the Wine Greape Growers Australia report2). The Wine Grape Growers Australia report highlights that the previous years of high rainfall resulted in ample water availability during the growing season, which reduced the 1 http://www.bom.gov.au/announcements/media_releases/ ho/20130301.shtml

impact of the extreme heat in many of the grape growing regions. Despite this, the Wine Grape Growers Australia report indicates that the yields of white wine varieties will be lower as a result of the heat. On the other hand, the report indicates that in cooler climate regions (they used Tasmania as their example), the extra heat has resulted in an increased red wine yield. As the Mornington Peninsula and Yarra Valley regions in Victoria are considered to be “cool climate”, this may mean that there may be a lot of red wine available next year—lovely! So the weather seems to have had an impact but I guess only time will tell as to what we get. Regardless, I look forward to sampling the 2013 vintage. In the meantime, here are a few photographs4 (see The Vintage Process item) from the harvest and wine-making process at Helens Hill Estate in the Yarra Valley, which looks like great fun. Maybe something to look into next year...

Duncan Ackerley Salinger, M.J. and Porteous, A.S., 1988, Agroclimatic aspects of grape growing in the Wairau and Awatere valleys: Part 1 – Climatic factors affecting growth and development, New Zealand Meteorological Service Commercial Report, no. 88/9, 19pp.

2 http://www.wgga.com.au/wp-content/uploads/HarvestReport-MAR-2013.pdf

Tait, A.B., 2008, Future projections of growing degree days and frost in New Zealand and some implications for grape growing, Weather and Climate, 28, 17–36.

3 http://www.chilloutwinetours.com.au/punt-road-vintage2013-yarra-valley/

4

http://helenshill.com.au/blog/

President’s Column

AMOS strategic objectives It’s been a long time in the making, but the draft AMOS strategic objectives are now open for comment by members, after discussion by the Executive and then by Council. Input from members made it clear that the highest priority for AMOS should be to be an independent voice of authority for the profession, and the draft objectives reflect that. The draft also comes with a new draft vision statement for AMOS: “To advance the scientific understanding of the atmosphere, oceans and climate system, and their socioeconomic and ecological impacts, and promote applications of this understanding for the benefit of all Australians”. The proposed strategic objectives for AMOS are as follows:

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1. To be an independent voice of authority and advocacy for the sciences covered by AMOS and for the profession. 2. To advance scientific and technological knowledge and foster applications in the sciences covered by AMOS through high-quality meetings, publications and other forms of communication. 3. To build a community in the sciences covered by AMOS, including amongst those in research, operations and amateur enthusiasts. 4. To advance the scientific literacy of the general population in the sciences covered by AMOS. 5. To attract talented and enthusiastic people into the sciences covered by AMOS.

6. To recognise excellence in the sciences covered by AMOS. 7. To advance the profession in the sciences covered by AMOS through effective communication of opportunities, and professional development. 8. To ensure the long-term future of AMOS through effective governance and sound financial management. A paper discussing these objectives is currently on the website1 and is open for member comment until early July. We would appreciate any input from members, particularly on the appropriateness of the strategic objectives, and whether there is anything important which we have missed. Following finalisation of the objectives (hopefully at the July Council meeting), our next step will be to develop an operational/implementation plan. Some of the objectives reflect activities which are already taking place, but others branch out into activities where we have had only a limited involvement in recent years, especially that of advancing the scientific literacy of the broader population. The Federal Budget came and went without anything too dramatic happening in our fields, although the proposed slowing of university funding growth (if it happens) is 1

a concern. It had been expected that the Government response to last year’s review of the Bureau’s high-impact weather capabilities (the Munro review) would be released with the Budget but it wasn’t, and is yet to see the light of day at the time of writing. I’ve recently been in South Africa to assist with a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) training workshop in climate monitoring for the countries of eastern and southern Africa. Doing something like this gives you an appreciation of the challenges that many parts of the world have in maintaining meteorological services. At the most extreme end of the scale, the fledgling meteorological service of South Sudan (which only became independent in 2011) has only three synoptic stations (two of which are essentially cut off from the capital for half the year and have unreliable communications), although many other countries have decent networks, and a surprisingly large number have at least some seasonal prediction capability. Closer to home, Australia is involved in a range of projects to improve capacity in Pacific island countries. All of this is very locally important but also contributes to the global picture.

Blair Trewin

http://www.amos.org.au/documents/item/658

News

International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences (IAMAS) News Tom Beer

National IAMAS Correspondant

James A. Screen first recipient of IAMAS Early Career Scientist Medal

IAMAS Executive Committee meetings during DACA13

The IAMAS Early Career Scientist Medal (ECSM) Committee has selected the 2013 (and first) recipient of the award—Dr. James Screen of Exeter University, United Kingdom (UK) and formerly of the University of Melbourne.

Two meetings of the IAMAS Executive Committee (EC) are scheduled in conjunction with the upcoming DACA13 on these dates:

The ECSM Committee reviewed the four strong nominations which were received, and then voted with an overwhelming majority for James Screen, aged 31, lead-author of 11 peer-reviewed publications since 2009. Together, his publications have been cited more than 200 times so far. The ECSM will be presented during the official opening session of Davos Atmosphere Cryosphere Assembly-2013 (DACA-13)1 in Davos on 8 July 2013, starting at 16:15.

EC-1: Sunday 7 July 2013, 14:00–18:00, room Schiahorn II, Congress Center. EC-2: Thursday 11 July 2013, 12:00–13:00, room Dischma, Congress Center. In the evening after EC-1, the traditional IAMAS-EC dinner will commence at 19:30 with an apéritif, followed by the meal starting at 20:00, most likely in Hotel Edelweiss (five minutes walk from the Congress Centre2).

ICCL 2013 Expert Assessment Workshop on “Decadal Climate Variability and Cross-Scale Interactions” The International Commission on Climate (ICCL) held the Expert Assessment Workshop on “Decadal Climate Variability and Cross-Scale Interactions” in Beijing,

1

www.DACA-13.org

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2

http://edelweiss-davos.ch/en/the-hotel.html

China on 16–17 April, 2013. The workshop invited eleven keynote speakers from five countries (China, Australia, USA, UK and Germany) to deliver topical lectures. About 50 faculty and postgraduate students from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and National Climate Center (NCC) attended the workshop. ICCL Executive Secretary and co-chair of the workshop, Prof. Jianping Li of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP), presided over the opening ceremony. ICCL President and co-chair, Prof. Neil Holbrook of the University of Tasmania gave the opening remarks. He outlined the missions of the ICCL and introduced the goals of the workshop: to assess and document key issues and knowledge gaps associated with decadal scale climate variability and cross-scale interactions in a warming world and provide key questions for future research. These were closely related to upcoming Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5) to be released in 2013. The workshop was organised within four sessions: 1.

Is the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation a real and dynamic feature of the climate system?

2.

Cross-scale interactions between El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), decadal variability and anthropogenic climate change.

3.

4.

not only for ICCL members, but also for decadal climate variability research communities outside the commission. (Received from Jianping Li and Neil Holbrook)

Status of the Workshop on Ice in Clouds and Precipitation: Addressing and Solving Measurement Problems Workshop preparations are underway for the meeting that will be held 5–6 July 2013 (the Friday and Saturday before DACA-13). Currently there are fifty-six participants who are helping to prepare the presentations focused on eleven topics that cover issues related to ice in clouds and precipitation. Each topic has co-leaders with backgrounds in modelling, remote sensing and in situ measurements. These co-leaders will take material provided by the contributing participants and organise it into concise presentations at the meeting where working groups will develop recommendations for future research and measurement technique developments. These presentations will be expanded into a monograph that will be published by early 2014. The issues that are being discussed are:

Science Issues 1.

Cirrus formation, evolution and impact on climate.

Unambiguous detection and attribution of anthropogenic climate change above natural decadal to multi-decadal climate variability—how best to do this?

2.

Contrails and contrail impact on cirrus formation.

3.

Mixed phase clouds and glaciation.

4.

Ice fog formation, evolution and climatic impact.

Decadal modes on regional climates.

5.

Precipitation formation and evolution from ice processes; properties of Precipitation.

The eleven invited talks were given by world leading scientists in the field of decadal climate variability, including Matthew Collins (Coordinating Lead Author, CLA, of IPCC AR5 Working Group 1, WG1), Mojib Latif, Thomas Knutson, Emanuele Di Lorenzo, Feifei Jin, Ronghui Huang, Guoxiong Wu, Chognyin Li, Neil Holbrook and Jianping Li. Scott Power (CLA of IPCC AR5 WG1) gave his talk remotely by phone from Australia. The talk was well received. The workshop was hosted by ICCL and organised by the National Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (LASG)/Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP), CAS. Dr. Ruiqiang Ding of the IAP is the chair of the Local Organising Committee. The participants all agreed that the workshop was inspiring and fruitful. It provided a unique platform for exchanges

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Measurement Issues 1.

Ice/liquid mass partitioning in mixed phase cloud.

2.

Properties of cloud particles.

3.

Composition of ice nuclei.

4.

3D ice water content.

5.

Calibration techniques and standards; measurement interferences.

6.

New sensors, platforms and analysis techniques; integrated measurement systems.

The workshop proceedings will be broadcast live via Webex. For more information contact Darrel Baumgardner, darrel.baumgardner@gmail.com.

News from the Centres

Melbourne Centre News Nicholas Tyrrell and Luke Hande Regional sub-editors, Melbourne

The launch for the AMOS weather tipping competition was held at the Victorian Regional Office at the Bureau of Meteorology on Thursday 21 March. This is the fifth year that AMOS has held its annual weather tipping competition. Luke Garde introduced the event by telling us about the new improved tipping website. The guest speaker for the night was Jane Golding, who has recently joined the Victorian Regional Office from Sydney. Jane guided us through the procedures of forecasting, and the important role of operational forecasters in interpreting model output data. The event coincided with an active storm front moving across the state that resulted in a tornado in northern Victoria, so the attendees got to see very much the forecasters in action.

On Thursday 18 April, the Melbourne centre organised a film night at Cinema Nova, for its members and interested guests, to watch the film Chasing Ice. The event was well attended by approximately 50 people. Set in the Arctic, Chasing Ice is a documentary by environmental photographer James Balog, who used time lapse photography to document a changing climate. To quote the filmmaker: “Chasing Ice is the story of one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of our changing planet.”. While this mission may seem a little melodramatic for the scientifically literate crowd of AMOS members, the film was certainly visually stunning and enjoyed by all.

Conference reports

4th WGNE workshop on systematic errors in weather and climate models 15–19 April 2013, United Kingdom Met Office, Exeter, United Kingdom Duncan Ackerley and Jennifer Catto Monash University, Clayton.

The 4th Working Group on Numerical Experimentation (WGNE) workshop on systematic errors in weather and climate models was held at the Met Office, Exeter, UK. The workshop covered a wide range of topics including tropical, polar and mid-latitude processes; ocean processes and ocean-atmosphere interaction; land surface processes; stratospheric processes and troposphericstratospheric interaction; holistic model evaluation and metrics; clouds, aerosol and radiation. Over 150 delegates attended the conference from many different research institutions across the world. The conference was opened with an interesting “food for thought” comment from Christian Jakob who drew attention to the fact that the model biases seen in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 3 (CMIP3) simulations have not changed much in the newer CMIP5 simulations. Christian drew attention to the fact that the lack of any ‘great leaps’ in fixing these biases needs to be addressed, which was one of the aims of holding the workshop. The workshop then kicked off fully with the tropical processes session, with invited speakers Catherine Rio (Institute Pierre Simon Laplace, IPSL, France), Julian Heming (Met Office, UK) and Daisuke Hotta (Japan Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol.26 page 36

Meteorological Agency, Japan) presenting. Dr Rio presented work on a new version of the convection scheme in the IPSL model, which delays the onset of convection, as the early triggering of convection is well known problem in General Circulation Models (GCMs). Following that, Dr Heming showed how numerical weather prediction (NWP) models struggled to capture the minimum mean sea level pressure in tropical cyclones, a problem that also appears to be insensitive to resolution. Finally Dr Hotta presented some very interesting work on how the semidiurnal tide is represented in the THORPEX Interactive Grand Global Ensemble (TIGGE) of models. These invited speakers were then followed by shorter talks and a combined “lunch and poster session” in the “Street” at the Met Office. The combination of talks, “posters plus lunch” and “posters plus nibbles and beer” continued throughout the week and worked extremely well (in our opinion, probably the best of any conference we have attended). Day two started with a session named “Holistic model evaluation and metrics”, which encompassed a wide range of talks on various regions of the globe. Beth Ebert (Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, CAWCR, Australia) gave a very interesting talk showing that as numerical weather forecasts have improved significantly over the last sixty years, the methods of verifying those

forecasts have also had to improve. Following that, Mark Rodwell (European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts, ECMWF, UK) discussed the methods employed at the ECMWF for diagnosing systematic errors in their model. The day took on a “Clouds, aerosol and radiation” theme in the afternoon with Leo Donner (Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, GFDL, USA) showing how improvements in the GFDL coupled model could be achieved by including the indirect and direct radiative effects of aerosol. Sandrine Bony closed out the second day with a talk about “The WCRP (World Climate Research Program) Grand Challenge on Clouds, Circulation and Climate Sensitivity”. This is one of the specific challenges for climate science that the WCRP is targeting with focussed research efforts to lead to significant progress over the next 5–10 years. The clouds, aerosols and radiation session wrapped up on day three with a summary from Sandrine Bony highlighting just how grand the challenge of modelling clouds in the climate system is; from the microphysical to the large-scale, the links between clouds and circulation, and the sensitivity of climate to clouds. Invited speaker, Bill Large from NCAR, opened the ocean processes session by teaching many in the audience the meaning of the word serendipity. By changing various ocean parameterizations, his group found unexpected improvements in systematic biases in the atmosphere. Tim Johns (on behalf of Sean Milton) from the Met Office then discussed the importance of coupled ocean-atmosphere interactions in NWP. At the end of the ocean session Peter Gleckler (Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, USA) summarised with a tale of the good (increased number of diagnostics available, improved methods of error analysis and experimentation), the bad (the resolution barrier in particular) and the ugly (there are still so many ocean processes poorly understood due to lack of observations). The Polar processes session which kicked off the fourth day of the workshop was relatively short, despite the four speakers (including invited speakers Thomas Jung from Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany, and Marika Holland from National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA) highlighting the numerous and varied issues unique to the polar regions. Two of the key problems are related to the presence of ice and snow, which produce unique atmospheric conditions and modelling challenges, and the lack of observational data over the region. The WCRP and the World Weather Research Programme (WWRP)

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are aware of the importance of some concerted effort in this area of research and have two new projects on polar climate and weather predictability and prediction. Sir Brian Hoskins from Imperial College, UK, started the midlatitude processes session by discussing the representation of blocking in climate models, suggesting that perhaps model resolution is not as important as capturing the latitude and structure of the jets. Heini Wernli from Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich followed this by presenting work identifying errors in all midlatitude weather systems. A clear focus in this session was on process-oriented evaluation of models as an intuitive and useful method for identifying biases. The final (half) day consisted of two sessions—land surface processes and stratospheric processes. Sonia Seneviratne (ETH Zurich) talked about “Land surface processes and the ability of models to represent them”, which showed the complexity of atmosphere-land-biosphere interactions and how difficult they are to represent. Also, the representation of soil moisture and its initialisation in models was highlighted as a key issue for the modelling community in general. Ted Shepherd was the last keynote speaker and highlighted the importance of the stratosphere on the troposphere. The stratospheric processes session also highlighted problems in the capability of models to represent the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation (QBO), which needs to be addressed. Andy Brown presented the main outcomes of a very full and varied workshop at the end of the final day’s sessions. One of the key barriers to evaluating models is a lack of observational data against which to compare—this is something that needs to be addressed by the international community. There are a large number of diagnostic techniques used to evaluate models and the timescales over which model errors develop, but there needs to be more of a link between the climate and NWP communities as many errors exist in both. Overall this was an excellent workshop with a varied program of talks, but all with a common goal of evaluating models in order to improve them and ultimately improve the predictability and prediction of weather and climate. Further details of the talks and the conference report can be found at: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/conference/wgne2013/agenda.

Articles

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): a brief introduction and an “insider” view Neville Nicholls

Immediate Past President, Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Address for correspondence: neville.nicholls@monash.edu

Background The IPCC, about every five years, prepares a comprehensive report on the state of knowledge of climate change1, assessing the physical basis for climate change (i.e. the nature of any changes and their possible causes), the vulnerability of countries and socioeconomic sectors to climate change, possible methods for adapting to climate change, and potential strategies for mitigating (i.e., avoiding) climate change. The assessment is based primarily on recent published scientific and technical literature and is intended to be “policy relevant but not policy prescriptive”. The primary target for these assessments are the 195 governments that are Members of the IPCC, but inevitably, given the topic and its political importance, IPCC reports are disseminated much more widely, and are commented on in great detail and used in many fora. How does the IPCC go about preparing these assessments, the most recent of which will be released progressively over the next 18 months? The IPCC process is labour intensive, time consuming, exhaustive and exhausting, and, in my experience, poorly understood by those not intimately involved. This note is intended to outline how the IPCC operates, from the perspective of an “insider”. What are my qualifications for writing this perspective? I have been involved in the writing of several IPCC assessments starting in 1990. My most recent experience has been as a Coordinating Lead Author (CLA) for the 2012 Special Report “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation” (also known as SREX). IPCC activity has occupied a great deal of my time and energy over quarter of a century, as it has for many of my colleagues, in Australia and internationally.

History The IPCC was established by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1988. In the same year the UN General Assembly endorsed the 1 The IPCC definition of “climate change” includes changes over an extended period, typically decades or longer, due to “natural internal processes or external forcings” as well as those due “to persistent anthropogenic changes in the composition of the atmosphere or in land use.” This contrasts with the definition in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which defines climate change only as “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere”.

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establishment of the IPCC. The IPCC published its first assessment in 1990, and that assessment played a role in the establishment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), under which international efforts have been made to reduce anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases causing global warming, and to improve our ability to cope with the consequences of climate change. The Second Assessment Report (SAR) was published in 1996 and was available during negotiations leading to signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. The Third Assessment Report (TAR) was published in 2001 and the Fourth (AR4) in 2007. As well as these major Assessment Reports, the IPCC also produces, through a similar mechanism, Special Reports on specific topics (such as the 2012 Special Report ”Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation”). The IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Work on the Fifth Assessment (AR5) Report commenced in mid-2009 and is to be completed through the next 18 months, with the approval sessions for the four volumes of the Assessment expected to end on the following dates: t

Working Group I (The Physical Science Basis): 26 September 2013

t

Working Group II (Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability; this Report also includes chapters with regional foci, including a chapter for Australia and New Zealand): 29 March 2014

t

Working Group III (Mitigation of Climate Change): 13 April 2014

t

Synthesis Report: 31 October 2014

Structure of the IPCC The IPCC is an intergovernmental body and membership is open to all member countries of the United Nations (UN) and WMO. Currently 195 countries are Members of the IPCC. The “Panel” is the group of Member governments, rather than the scientists and others who draft, revise and review the IPCC Assessment Reports. This is an important distinction, since some parts of IPCC Assessments (the “underlying” Chapters of the Report) are identified as the work of the scientist authors while other parts (primarily the Summaries for Policymakers, SPMs) are approved by the Panel as a whole. And it was the IPCC as a whole that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and not the individual

scientist authors (although the IPCC has recognized the contributions of the scientists to the award). The Panel holds Sessions (often referred to loosely as “Plenaries”), to which Member countries send delegations (officials and experts from relevant Ministries and research institutions), approximately once a year. These plenary sessions are also attended by observer organisations (generally other UN agencies or Non-Government Organisations, NGOs). Major responsibilities of the Panel include: t

election of the IPCC Chair, the Co-Chairs of the three Working Groups, and the IPCC Bureau and Task Force Bureau;

t

structure and mandate of IPCC Working Groups and Task Forces;

t

IPCC Principles and Procedures;

t

work-plan of the IPCC;

t

budget of the IPCC;

t

scope and outline of IPCC reports;

t

approval, adoption and acceptance of reports;

t

development and revision of procedures for preparing and communicating reports, and for dealing with issues such as conflict of interest.

The IPCC also has a “Bureau” consisting of the IPCC Chair, the IPCC Vice-Chairs, the Co-Chairs and Vice-Chairs of the Working Groups and the Co-Chairs of the Task Force. The IPCC Bureau is chaired by the IPCC Chair. Members of the Bureau provide scientific and technical support to the Chair of the IPCC and the Co-Chairs of the Working Groups and are chosen on the basis of their scientific expertise. The composition of the Bureau represents the different regions of the world, in common with the practice of many United Nations organisations. There is also an Executive Committee, consisting of the IPCC Chair and Vice-Chairs, and the Co-Chairs of the Working Groups and the Task Force. The Executive Committee has the responsibility for taking urgent decisions between the approximately annual meetings of the Panel. Each Working Group (and the Task Force) also has its own Bureau, consisting of the Co-Chairs and Vice-Chairs. The IPCC is currently organised in three Working Groups and a Task Force. t

Working Group I deals with “The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change”.

t

Working Group II deals with “Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”.

t

Working Group III deals with “Mitigation of Climate Change”.

t

The Task Force refines the methodology for the calculation and reporting of national greenhouse gas emissions and reductions.

The Working Groups and Task Force normally each have two co-chairs (one from a developed country and one Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol.26 page 39

from a developing country). They are assisted by Technical Support Units (TSUs), which are hosted and financially supported by the government of the developed country Co-Chair of that Working Group or the Task Force. Working Groups also meet in Plenary, with governments represented by delegations, to decide on Working Group matters (such as approving a Working Group report).

Preparing an IPCC Assessment Once the IPCC Plenary decides to proceed with a new assessment, provides guidance on the expected content of the assessment, and proposes dates for its completion, one or more “scoping meetings” combining selected experts and Working Group Bureaux are convened to develop a proposed structure and outline of the report. Once this is developed it is presented to the Working Group Plenary for approval. The “approved” chapter titles for the WGI AR5 report are: 1.

Introduction

2.

Observations: Atmosphere and Surface

3.

Observations: Oceans

4.

Observations: Cryosphere

5.

Information from Paleoclimate Archives

6.

Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles

7.

Clouds and Aerosols

8.

Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing

9.

Evaluation of Climate Models

10. Detection and Attribution of Climate Change from Global to Regional 11. Near-term Climate Predictability

Change:

Projections

12. Long-term Climate Change: Commitments and Irreversibility

and

Projections,

13. Sea Level Change 14. Climate Phenomena and their Relevance for Future Regional Climate Change The IPCC Bureau invites Members of the IPCC (and observer organisations) to nominate Coordinating Lead Authors (CLAs), Lead Authors (LAs) and Review Editors (REs) for each chapter of the report. Governments and other bodies nominate potential authors. The Working Group Bureaux then have the responsibility for selecting the authors (and may add other authors not nominated by IPCC members). The selected authors must be experts in their field, but the selection should also reflect a geographical and gender balance. This balance and wide geographical representation can be illustrated by the countries of residence of the 14 CLAs and LAs for the SREX chapter in which I was involved: Argentina; Australia (two authors); Brazil; Canada; China; Germany; Iran; Japan; Norway; United Kingdom; USA (two authors); Switzerland. The Review Editors were from

Argentina and Russia. The authors, as is typical for IPCC assessments, included experienced IPCC authors as well as IPCC “rookies”, although all had published extensively in a relevant field. Australia is well represented in the author list for AR5 in Working Group I (4 CLAs; 8 LAs; spread over 14 chapters). There are relatively fewer Australian authors for the Working Group II report (5 CLAs across 30 chapters, including one chapter specifically on Australia and New Zealand), and even fewer Australians are involved in preparing the Working Group III report (no CLA; 5 LAs). The authors selected for each Working Group report will then meet, with the Co-Chairs and TSU, to initiate the process of developing a “zero order draft”. Preparation of this draft will typically take about three months. The CLAs and LAs will, where they deem it necessary, invite “Contributing Authors” to provide additional text or diagrams. The draft is then distributed to a small number of reviewers, who provide feedback mainly on how well the structure and proposed content works, for each chapter. The next step will be preparation of the First Order Draft. This will usually be initiated at another meeting of the authors (there are typically four meetings of authors, during the preparation of each of the Working Group reports in an Assessment). At this meeting issues between the chapters such as the potential for duplication will start to be identified and resolved. As well, the first steps will be taken to prepare the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) for the report (there will be an SPM for each of the three reports, as well as for the Synthesis Report—a sub-group of the authors of total CLAs and LAs involved in writing the chapters for the report work on the SPM). The First Order Draft will then be distributed for “expert review”. At this stage anyone can self nominate as an “expert”, as long as they can provide justification for claiming “expert” status, and on condition that they agree to respect the confidentiality of the drafts, to avoid premature release of early drafts. Several months are allowed for the expert reviews to provide their comments to the authors. These comments are lodged and logged electronically and identified by the name of the expert providing them (at least for Working Group I). For the AR5 the First Order Draft of the Working Group I report received 21,400 comments from 659 experts. The authors must respond, in writing, to each of the reviewer comments and these responses are recorded electronically in a database that also includes the original reviewer comments. The authors meet for a third time, to consider the reviewer comments, and to start the preparation of the Second Order Draft. Review Editors attend this meeting, to ensure that the authors deal with review comments appropriately. The Second Order Draft is then sent back to the experts who commented on the First Order Draft. The Second Order Draft is also sent to the government Members of the IPCC who provide their own review of the draft. Each country has a different method for carrying out this “government review”—some convene small meetings of Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol.26 page 40

experts and provide a collated and edited set of comments; other countries simply publicize the draft and collate all comments received. The Second Order Draft of the AR5 Working Group I report received 31,422 comments from about 800 experts and 26 governments. At this stage we approach the “cut-off date” for scientific literature to be cited in the report. For Working Group I this date is about six months before the final Plenary “approval meeting”. If a scientific paper cited in the draft is not accepted for publication in a journal by this date it must be deleted from the final version of the report. If “grey literature” (i.e. scientific literature not generally available through a journal or from a commercial book publisher) is used in the report then a copy must be made available on an IPCC webpage. During the review process such grey literature must also be made available to the reviewers. Another author meeting is now held to consider the review comments on the Second Order Draft, and to commence the preparation of the Final Draft. The Final Draft is then returned to governments for a final review (although at this stage only the draft SPM can be commented upon). The final author meeting is held immediately prior to a Working Group Plenary, to respond to the government comments on the final draft of the SPM. The revised draft is then taken into the Working Group Plenary for discussion and, ultimately, approval. The SPM is discussed and approved (after, if necessary, changes based on suggestions from the Plenary) line-by-line (and, if necessary, wordby-word). Coordinating Lead Authors, and other authors where necessary, explain and defend their chapter’s contributions to the SPM in the Plenary. If there is a dispute in the Plenary, the Co-Chairs may establish a “contact group” consisting of several governments, to develop and propose refined language. Authors will meet with these contact groups in this process. The role of the Plenary is to ensure that the text that the authors have selected from their chapters for inclusion in the SPM is appropriate and that it is expressed in a clear and concise fashion. Significant improvements in the language in the drafts are often made in Plenary. The final version of the SPM must, however, clearly reflect the underlying text in the chapters, and links from the SPM to specific sections in chapters are included to ensure this occurs. The chapters hence underpin the text of the SPM, and the chapters in the “underlying report” are the responsibility of the authors of that chapter, whereas the Panel has the responsibility for the SPM itself. The Working Group Plenary will then work to “accept” the underlying report (i.e. the chapters prepared and identified by the authors) and “approve” the SPM. This usually happens in the early hours of the morning after the final day of the Plenary (i.e., after four days, and sometimes nights, of discussion and forthright debate among governments and between governments and authors), and only hours before a scheduled press conference to release the approved SPM.

Once all three Working Groups have gone through this process, a Plenary of the Panel as a whole will be convened to approve the Synthesis Report, which collates the most important material from all three Working Group reports.

Problems and Controversies The field of climate change science has exploded over the years since the establishment of the IPCC. In the five years ending in 1990, when the First Assessment Report was completed, 607 papers which included at least one of the terms “climate change”, “greenhouse effect” or “global warming” in the title or identified as a topic of the paper were published in the scientific literature (according to a search in Web of Science). In the last five years, the period ending in 2012, there were 47,284 papers published that included one or more of these terms. Although the typical number of authors of each chapter in an IPCC assessment has increased over this period, the task for authors now (to collate, analyse and summarize the recent scientific literature) has increased dramatically in complexity. This increased complexity caused by the explosion in the rate of publishing on climate change has, of course, increased the likelihood that important papers might be overlooked in the assessment process, although improved electronic access to journals has offset this increasing complexity somewhat. As well, the explosion of literature has increased the likelihood that authors may misinterpret papers. It also means that it can be more challenging for the authors to assimilate all the literature into a readily understandable summary, suitable for non-expert readers and governments. The multi-chapter organisation of a Working Group report is a challenge, because there are inevitably cross-chapter issues. Dealing with these requires considerable time, and many inter-chapter meetings, to ensure consistency across the report. Even more challenging are the inevitable issues that arise between Working Groups. Working Group II’s assessment of the impacts of climate change requires, for instance, detailed knowledge of the likely content and conclusions of the Working Group I’s report on observed and projected climate changes. Because of this difficulty, the completion dates of the three Working Group reports are “staggered”, with Working Group I appearing first. But even with this staggering in time, the process of ensuring consistency between the three Working Groups is difficult. Despite the explosion of literature in the field, some of the most pertinent questions asked by governments and other policymakers simply have not yet been addressed with credible science. Some questions can receive partial answers, but for others the questions have to be modified to match the questions addressed within the available literature. Of course such mismatches are highlighted in IPCC Assessments, which then frequently act as a catalyst, leading researchers to better target their research to address questions that would be potentially more useful for policymakers. The transparent nature of the IPCC review process is both a strength and a potential weakness for the assessments. Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol.26 page 41

The identity of the reviewer is attached to each comment (at least for Working Group I reports), and the responses from the authors to the comments are included, with the comments, in a publically accessible database, once the Report is approved. This means that, even though individuals may disagree with how the authors have responded to a specific comment, at least readers can see the justification provided by the authors for their response. This contrasts with the typical anonymous exchanges between reviewers and authors, mediated by an editor, that takes place when a scientific paper is submitted to a journal for publication. On the other hand, the transparent nature of the review process may discourage some experts from providing frank and full comments, if this is seen, for instance, as an attack on the authors of the assessment. I have to say, however, that I haven’t seen much evidence of potential reviewers being shy to attack the authors, even if they are close and respected colleagues! Most review comments are helpful to the authors, identifying important works missed in the early drafts, or suggesting alternative language more likely to reach a consensus amongst our colleagues, or even suggesting a fresh viewpoint on a specific topic. The best comments are succinct, raise important issues, provide the evidence for the reviewer’s assertion, and suggest alternative language to that in the draft Report. But some comments simply waste the time of the authors, and do not contribute to improved assessments. Some reviewers delight in pointing out grammatical or spelling mistakes (or punctuation errors), despite the fact that all drafts are revised repeatedly (and eventually go through the filter of an experienced copy-editor to catch such minor problems). Other reviewers launch into rambling, evidence-free attacks, or simply list the reviewer’s papers that “must” be cited in the Report (usually without indicating where or why). One problem with some review comments is that the authors are always operating under very strict and restrictive page lengths for their chapter. So it is physically impossible to include everything that has been written on a topic, and selection of the most critical evidence is crucial. Few reviewers suggest how to incorporate their suggestions without pushing the length of the chapter over the agreed page length. The sheer size of the assessments means that typos and other errors can slip through the review and revision process, although improved electronic tools are helping to offset any increased likelihood of such errors getting through. Reviewers can get tired fighting their way through the dull, porridge-like, text that we scientists write, and authors themselves may eventually get worn down by the process. It is quite surprising, given the complexity and size of the assessments, how few errors have been identified in the various assessments (only a handful, and none in the Summaries for Policymakers, as far as I am aware). If you compare this with the typical number of typos and other errors you see in your daily newspaper, the quality control measures of the IPCC seem

to working exceedingly well, despite the complexity and length of the Assessments. The exhausting nature of the approval process described earlier is a problem of itself. Long nights are required throughout the Plenary approval meeting, the discussions and disagreements between Members of the Panel can sometimes be substantial (and yet consensus must be reached, eventually), and final approval is usually obtained only hours before the scheduled media conference to announce the results of the Plenary approval process. The last-minute nature of final approval is a potentially dangerous situation, whereby some error of interpretation could arise in the last few hours of discussion and approval and text revision. There has been some criticism of the IPCC assessments, from individuals and groups. In particular, there has been a great deal of attention on the so-called “hockey stick”, a paleoclimatic reconstruction of the climate over several hundred years that pointed out the unusual nature of the recent (and projected) warming in the historical context. This figure achieved “iconic” status when it was published in the Working Group I SPM for the Third Assessment report in 2001. When it did not appear in the SPM for the Working Group I AR4 report some commentators suggested this was because the IPCC had deliberately omitted the figure because of embarrassment. In fact, the figure was still included in the report (but not in the SPM – although the SPM did describe it in text), and this time the figure stretched further back in time and included more independent reconstructions confirming the underlying “shape” of the hockey stick (for reference it is Figure 6.10 in the AR4 report). Of greater embarrassment was the incorrect statement, buried deep within the AR4 Working Group II report, asserting that the likelihood of the Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate”, even though this statement did not percolate through into the Chapter’s Executive Summary or the SPM. Probably the most substantive issue that has been raised with the IPCC assessments is their tendency to be conservative. This tendency is not surprising. Imagine attempting to get 15 scientists to agree together on each sentence in a chapter of 140 pages, as well as fairly representing and responding to thousands of comments by perhaps 200 reviewers. The aim is to try to reach, as far as possible, a consensus between the authors, while still reflecting any substantive points of disagreement within the scientific community. As well, remember that papers accepted for publication in the last six months prior to the completion of the assessment cannot be included. And the scientists writing these reports are naturally conservative – none of us would like to make an outrageous claim that might be contradicted quickly and easily by our colleagues. One facet of this conservatism is reflected in the reluctance of IPCC authors to reach a major conclusion based on a single freshly published scientific paper. Rather, we try to gather “multiple lines of evidence” for any major conclusions. This conservative approach Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol.26 page 42

to the literature also gets reflected in the conservative nature of an IPCC Assessment. So it should not come as a surprise that parts of the IPCC assessments are sometimes superseded by fresh science soon after publication. Don’t expect ground-breaking science in an IPCC Assessment— rather, an IPCC Assessment is a balanced summary of well-established knowledge at a specific moment in time.

Is it worth it? So, is the effort of hundreds of authors and reviewers over four years to produce an Assessment worthwhile? Is it worth this long and sustained effort to produce a report that is out-of-date as soon as it is published, is conservative, and written in the turgid prose beloved of scientists? To illustrate just how much work is involved, I can point out that over the 2.5 years I was involved in preparing a chapter of SREX, Dr Sonia Seneviratne and I (as the two CLAs for the chapter) exchanged, on average, five emails per day, every day. This doesn’t include emails that we jointly received from other authors, or other chapters or the TSU or Co-Chairs. Nor does this include the many face-to-face meetings and other forms of meeting we had to employ. How many more scientific papers could we have published, if we had not devoted most evenings, part of every weekend, and significant parts of our annual vacations, to drafting, revising, and defending, our chapter? And, since we do IPCC assessments pro bono, we have to fit our “day jobs” around this work. There are, no doubt, benefits for the authors. The writing of the IPCC Assessments requires the authors to broaden and deepen their understanding of the published literature in their field. And the intense effort required in preparing the assessments leads to productive collaborations between authors, in future years. And “being in the room” with other scientists from other fields in the climate change landscape often leads to interesting cross-disciplinary insights and collaborations. But the largest benefit I have received from my involvement with the IPCC has been watching, firsthand, how the science-policy interaction works, and learning how to interact firstly with other scientists to identify a scientific consensus on climate change, and then with delegates from IPCC Member nations to ensure the language of the assessments is clear and concise (all the while respecting the science above all other considerations). There are personal benefits as well. Just having IPCC Assessments listed on your CV is probably going to be helpful, at least for the younger authors. And you get to travel to cities you never wanted to visit (although the only part of the country you will see is the road between the airport and the conference centre), and get overly familiar with the insides of hotel rooms and conference centres that look just like the ones back home. But the Assessments do get cited frequently, so they build up your citations quite quickly. However, for Australian academics this is of little direct benefit since the citations databases beloved of our research funding organisations and universities don’t even include reports such as the IPCC Assessments (nor any citations to these). I have no doubt that, for an individual

scientist at an Australian university, the effort would be better spent doing other things. From the point of view of your career, it would be more profitable to publish a single-author paper in a top-ranked journal (and it would be much faster and less stressful to do this) than take part in an IPCC Assessment. But it has to be said that for over two decades that the IPCC process has worked to assimilate a rapidly growing scientific literature about climate change, and to provide summaries relevant to policy and decision making by governments and other interested parties. The Assessment Reports have been important briefing material for the international negotiations on climate change held under the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC). The interest shown in the IPCC reports, by governments, the media, and others, illustrates just how important these Assessments have been. If the IPCC did not exist, or if significant numbers of my colleagues did not continue to prepare these assessments pro bono and at considerable cost to their families and themselves, we would need to invent another process to provide governments with a fair and credible assessment of climate change, its impacts, and what might be done about it. I can’t see how a fairer, more comprehensive, or more credible alternative could be designed. There are aspects of the way the IPCC is designed, and the mechanisms used to produce Assessment Reports that help ensure the Reports are balanced and credible. The involvement of rather large groups of scientists to prepare each Chapter of the assessment, along with the open and transparent review process, means that the authors try very hard to produce a consensus report, rather than something that reflects just the views of part of the scientific community. Identification of the scientist authors with the underlying Chapters means we are very wary of making outrageous statements that could be easily

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rebutted, especially by our peers. The fact that, over more than 20 years, the various Assessment Reports have been criticised by few within mainstream science, and very rarely at that, is indicative of how well the process has worked. The frequent reliance on the IPCC Reports, by commentators from a wide spectrum of climate change views, from sceptical to zealot, also indicates their value and credibility.

Further reading Much more detail about the history and operation of the IPCC, along with downloadable reports, is available at the IPCC website2, from which much of the above information, especially the formal information about the structure, has been taken. Dr John Zillman, ex-Director of Meteorology, for Australia, has summarised a great deal of the history of the IPCC (he was instrumental in its establishment) in: Zillman, J.W., 2007, Australian participation in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 1988-2001, Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, 20, 30–35 and 92–96. Dr Zillman has also published his assessment of a commissioned review of the IPCC undertaken by the InterAcademy Council in 2010 in: Zillman, J.W., 2010, The InterAcademy Council Review of the IPCC, Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, 23, 122–133. It is the intention of AMOS to publish this article on the AMOS web site as a booklet with its own link. Members will be informed when this occurs. — Ed. 2

www.ipcc.ch

My working life: 1965–2006 Matthias Tomczak

AMOS member, South Australia

Where it all began

The first job

I began my studies of oceanography in a small villa belonging to the University of Hamburg, where Walter Hansen pioneered the numerical calculation of tides. Students did not have access to computers in those days, and I spent many hours solving the boundary-value problem on a calculator and filling numbers into a gridded map of the North Sea. This was not quite my idea of marine science, which for me had more to do with wind, waves and a wide sky. Through one of my father’s contacts, an oceanographer that worked at the German Hydrographic Institute predicting sea level and storm surges, I managed to get work experience on board the institute’s RV Gauss as part of a project to locate the oil reservoirs of the North Sea.

The 1950s and 1960s were the times of the “Wirtschaftswunder”, and jobs could be found on the street. I wanted to continue studying towards a PhD but was called before the government’s medical officer to be drafted into the military. The navy had just established its own oceanographic research institute in another villa around the corner from the university’s institute, with Wolfgang Krauss, the head of the university’s department of theoretical oceanography, as acting director. He needed new staff and offered me a position. It was an offer I could not refuse. Not only did it mean that as a civilian I did not have to undergo the mind-numbing military training, it also allowed me to proceed with my PhD at full pay. The downside was that my work was now fully theoretical. I graduated in 1968 as a Dr. rer. nat. (Doctor rerum naturalium, “Doctor of the things of nature”, equivalent to a PhD) with a thesis on the generation of internal waves by wind.

Our Graf-Askania sea gravimeter had an accuracy of a few milligal (the acceleration due to the Earth’s gravity is close to 1 kilogal). It was mounted on a gyro-stabilized platform at the centre of the ship’s motion—I still have vivid memories of my stomach churning every time I had to step into the windowless cubicle in the ship’s belly, full of the smell of oil and lubricant, to face the unpredictable movements of the instrument. It was fascinating to observe how a change of the ship’s course of only a few degrees produced a change of the centrifugal acceleration from the Earth’s rotation large enough to affect the readings. I liked the theory behind it, but the awkward location of the instrument and its effect on my stomach convinced me to stay away from geophysics. So after a year I moved to the Baltic coast and continued my oceanographic studies in a small villa of the Institut für Meereskunde at the University of Kiel, which under the directorship of Günter Dietrich was rapidly developing into a multidisciplinary institution with seagoing capacity. In Kiel oceanographic studies included multiple excursions into the Baltic on the university’s small research vessel. But the data for my thesis did not come from new observations; they came from a bundle of yellowed papers Günter Dietrich had rescued from the ruins of the Institut für Meereskunde in Berlin: hand-written records of currents, temperature and salinity collected by the research vessel Meteor during the German North-Atlantic Expedition of 1937. The observations had been made with the ship at anchor in water depths of a few hundred metres. Each time series spanned three days, during which period a current meter was lowered and raised repeatedly over the side of the ship. The observations were strongly influenced by the swaying of the ship at anchor and rather hard to interpret. Nevertheless, in 1965 I handed in my thesis and received my Diploma of Oceanography (the equivalent of the B.Sc. Honours degree). Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol.26 page 44

An unexpected bonus of being employed by the Department of Defense was the opportunity to spend half a year in Paris. My girlfriend (and later wife) Chris studied French literature, and I was always interested in foreign countries. There was no Internet in those days, but the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) had published a directory of oceanographic institutions of the world and their staff that indicated the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle as an institution performing marine research in Paris. I went to the library, searched through the publications of its staff and found someone who worked in an area similar to mine. It was then only a matter of convincing the Department of Defense that I could not possibly solve my theoretical wave problem without spending six months with that colleague. This was in 1967. The German military attaché assumed that I was under the direction of the Museum’s director, who thought that I was the attaché’s responsibility, so Chris and I had a wonderful time exploring the chateaux and galleries of France. But my stay in Paris became important because it was at least partly responsible for my move to Australia fifteen years later. It was the time of the student protests against the Vietnam War, following the Tet Offensive of January 1968, which expanded into a social revolt against the government and culminated, in May 1968, in de Gaulle’s hasty retreat from Paris to the headquarters of the French military in Germany. We had to return to Kiel at the end of April and missed out on the barricades of May but shared many marches and demonstrations during the buildup and returned to Germany with much raised political awareness.

Getting “on deck” of ships Doing theoretical work for the navy was not to my liking. When an opportunity arose in 1969 to return to the Institut für Meereskunde I did not hesitate to take it, and a few months later I was on my first oceanographic research voyage: two months on the Atlantic Ocean between Africa and the Canary Islands. It was the first of several voyages to study the coastal upwelling region along the Mauritanian coast on the new RV Meteor. Built in 1964 to accommodate 24 scientists she was designed for interdisciplinary research. Physical oceanographers, meteorologists, biologists and chemists worked together to try and unravel the details of a productive ecosystem by following the history of a small body of water over a period of four weeks. It was the time of the successful introduction into world oceanography of the conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) instrument developed by Bruce Hamon and his lab assistant Neil Brown at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) (see Bruce Hamon’s account of his working life in the December 2012 issue of BAMOS. — Ed.). The University of Kiel had a very advanced department of applied physics with the energetic Werner Kröbel at its head. Kröbel wanted to build his own version of the CTD. His “Multisonde”, which I have used on a number of voyages, had a comprehensive set of sensors (it included an oxygen sensor and transmissometer very early in its development) but fell down on its data management. The data were recorded on punched paper tape. They were also recorded on a reel-to-reel tape deck, but because they were written in analog form they could only be retrieved if the playback was performed at exactly the same tape speed as the recording, something verging on the impossible, and I did much of my research cutting, splicing and feeding paper tape into the university’s mainframe computer. When I looked at the data from the first upwelling expedition it turned out that following the history of a small body of water before the general oceanography of the area was understood was ill-advised; our water body interacted with other water masses in a manner we had not anticipated. A second expedition in 1972 with two research vessels, Meteor and Planet, included an early attempt to combine remote sensing with data collection in the field. Collecting sea surface temperature data from the air was the job of three colleagues from the German Space Research Agency GFVLR, which was located near Munich in Bavaria. The GFVLR people could process the films but needed someone with expertise to interpret them and make decisions for the flight plan of the next day. So I spent three weeks on Gran Canaria as oceanographic adviser to three Germans from Bavaria, whose dialect was totally incomprehensible to me. Fortunately they turned to a version of “High German” when they wanted to be understood. The research plane, an English Electric Canberra bomber, had been mothballed for many years. Purchased by the GFVLR and brought back into service as a remote sensing platform, it arrived in Gran Canaria leaking hydraulic Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol.26 page 45

fluid and fuel from various outlets. This continued during the entire period, and I developed real admiration for the pilots, who managed to get the thing up and down again every day. A complicating feature was the fact that the jet’s engines were started with cartridges, and importing explosives into Spanish territory proved not to be straightforward. Being the only one in the group to know a bit of Spanish it became my job to ride back and forth on my hired motorscooter between the customs office, the German honorary consul and the port to get the boxes released, and when the aeroplane was in the air I explored the island and enjoyed the scenery. It was one of my best research experiences.

A job in Cuba In the late 1960s French and Italian scientists had started a series of annual summer schools in Cuba to assist its science to catch up with modern developments. Cuban oceanographers had learnt to appreciate the oceanographic research efforts of the Soviet Union but realised its limitations. In 1973 I decided to forgo my annual holidays (the university did not condone teaching in Cuba) to join hundreds of scientists from Europe and North America in Havana and contribute a course in dynamical oceanography, using self-made elaborate mimeographed lecture notes. The Cuban students had just completed the construction of their new oceanographic research laboratory—all professional builders were needed for the construction of housing around the country, so the students and university staff had built their laboratory themselves with funds from the government. Their enthusiasm for science remains one of my most cherished professional memories. I was asked to come back the following year for a course on waves and tides, but I did not feel competent for that and managed to talk Paul LeBlond of the University of British Columbia into giving the course. While I was in Cuba one of my local colleagues approached me for help with the cooling design for a planned power station. This required a numerical model and, in the early 1970s, access to a mainframe computer. I had neither the expertise nor access to the required amount of computer time. But I still had good contact with some of my colleagues at the Naval institute that—being a Department of Defense institution—had a powerful much underutilised computer. I went to see the scientist in charge, and we agreed that the ongoing Cold War should not stop us from running a model of a bay in Cuban waters on a West German military computer but that the authorities did not have to know about it. The paper “A numerical model of the circulation in Cienfuegos Bay, Cuba” appeared in Estuarine and Coastal Marine Science (Tomczak and Garcia Diaz, 1975).

An international research program In the same year I was at sea again in the Canary Current region. The study of coastal upwelling systems was a popular topic in the 1970s, promoted by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations

in the hope that the immense biological productivity of upwelling systems could be sensibly managed to support a growing world population. In 1970 the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO, and the FAO began planning the Cooperative Investigation of the Northern Part of the Eastern Central Atlantic (CINECA) with a multi-ship survey that was to involve France, Ghana, East and West Germany, Mauritania, Morocco, Poland, Senegal, Spain, the UK, the USA and the USSR. The plan soon ran up against the separate interests of participating countries and did not succeed; Germany declared the 1972 expedition (in which I participated) a CINECA contribution, but its research plan had been developed without regard to anyone else in the program. In 1975 CINECA was over, but a cooperative voyage between RV Meteor and the British RV Discovery took up the challenge to develop a complete picture of upwelling dynamics. Nine deep-sea current meter moorings were laid; a real challenge when you had only three or four satellite fixes a day and had to rely on dead reckoning inbetween (no GPS in those days!). After the one-month observation period three moorings could not be relocated, or the newly developed acoustic release mechanisms failed. Today such moorings are retrieved successfully after deployments of a year and more.

Migration to Australia Unfortunately I did not find the time to complete the analysis of the data in Kiel. Politics caught up with me. Kiel has always had a tradition of active protest against governments; an uprising of its sailors in 1918 had triggered the fall of the monarchy and given rise to the Weimar republic. During the turbulent 1970s the elected student representatives at the university were always members of Communist and Maoist groups, and I, though no longer a student but a member of staff, had worked with them in protests (against the Vietnam war, among others). Eventually I fell prey to the “Berufsverbot”, the ruling that Communists and their ilk were not allowed in public employment. My career as an academic in Germany had come to an end. My colleagues started a petition, protests arrived from around the world, and the director of the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg Klaus Hasselmann was prepared to employ me on a contract basis. This lasted for a year. Then Peter Hughes from Liverpool University, who had been cruise leader on the Discovery in 1975, got a grant from the British Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to employ me, so in 1977 and 1978 Peter and I managed to work on the data collected together and completed a joint publication. But the prospect of living on an annually renewable grant (today the fate of many scientists!) did not appeal to me, and when the CSIRO advertised a five-year contract with possibility of conversion to permanent employment I jumped at the opportunity.

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Australia has never been paranoid about communists and other lefties, and the CSIRO took me simply on my merits. Dave Rochford, the Chief of the CSIRO Division of Fisheries and Oceanography happened to be in Rome on international science business; he asked me to meet him there for an interview, and I was offered the job. We arrived in Sydney in March 1979 and were greeted at the airport by a distinguished, soft-spoken gentleman, quite the opposite of the “typical Australian bloke”. Bruce Hamon took us in his car to preliminary accommodation in Cronulla close to the Division, an accumulation of buildings of different vintage and styles located in the most beautiful surroundings that encourage ideas to fly free. I started work the following day, and three months later I was already at sea again, having been appointed cruise leader on a voyage to study the structure of an East Australian Current eddy.

The first taste of the Pacific I had never worked in the Pacific before and had to learn fast. I was also back to water bottle sampling—no CTD on board CSIRO’s research vessel Sprightly. Nevertheless I extracted from the data the presence of Bass Strait water in the Tasman Sea and surmised that it could be traced as far north as Newcastle. Bass Strait water travels north along the continental slope as a narrow band of less than 100 m vertical extent and is therefore mostly missed in surveys based on bottle samples. Where it is present it shows up as a single measurement of unusually high salinity. Although Fred Boland and Stuart Godfrey had reported such singular observations before and interpreted them as Bass Strait water influence, such data were mostly eliminated as “erroneous” or “doubtful”. Following the 1979 Sprightly voyage I went back to the archives, extracted all eliminated measurements from the original hand-written records and built up a picture of the extent of Bass Strait water in the Tasman Sea. It reinforced my conviction that data can be flagged as suspicious but should never be eliminated from the database. Voyages in 1981, now equipped with CTD, showed the Bass Strait water outflow clearly in the now continuous vertical profiles of temperature and salinity. The year 1981 was also the year of my first publication of what I termed Optimum Multiparameter (OMP) water mass analysis (Tomczak, 1981). By adding nutrients, oxygen and other tracers to temperature and salinity as parameters, the spreading history of water masses can be analyzed, and the contributions from different sources to a mix of water masses becomes accessible to quantitative determination. The technique has become a standard procedure for water mass analysis and found extensive use in dozens of studies. The University of Hamburg conferred on me the degree of Dr. habil. (Dr. habilitatus, “able doctor”, someone qualified to teach at a German university) for this work in 1984. RV Sprightly was a converted deep-sea rescue tug only a quarter the size of Germany’s Meteor and not the most comfortable ship to go to sea in—no wonder Australian oceanographers could not face a research voyage longer than two weeks. I was used to being at sea for 6–8 weeks

at a time and thought that as a maritime nation Australia should set its eyes further than its territorial waters and economic zone and contribute to research of the open ocean. I for one wanted to go further afield and thus had to bring my colleagues to accept the idea of longer voyages. In 1982 I managed to get the faithful Sprightly to within 2 degrees of the equator, with port calls in Honiara (Solomon Islands) and Nouméa (New Caledonia) to break the six weeks into acceptable two-week slices. I was pushing the boundaries; Sprightly’s air conditioning barely coped, and the computers had to be protected from the condensation dripping from tubes hanging under the ceiling. But the voyage produced a valuable data set that allowed the detailed study of the circulation into and out of the Coral Sea.

Fulfillment of a long-held wish Just when my five-year contract was about to expire the government announced that CSIRO’s oceanography would be moved to Hobart. For someone who loved living in cities like Hamburg, Paris and Sydney, the Tasmania of 1984 could not be part of one’s life plan. Things have changed, and changed dramatically, and I often thought that maybe, just maybe, I should have stayed with the CSIRO and enjoyed its new world-class facilities, but I am talking here about the Tasmania of 1984. Fortunately Sydney University happened to be looking for a physical oceanographer to complement its marine biology activities, so I joined its Department of Geology and Geophysics as a senior lecturer. After nearly twenty years in research the move to the university defined a new chapter in my working life. I had always loved dealing with young people in an educational role, and finally getting into a university position was the fulfillment of an old wish. But it was also a great challenge. In Germany oceanographic research is organised in large federally funded research institutions that are attached to state-funded universities, and federal positions like the one I had held in Kiel are not teaching positions; my contact with university teaching had been limited to working with PhD students. At the CSIRO graduate students were a rarity, and I had worked entirely in research. Now I was asked to single-handedly build up an undergraduate program of physical oceanography. Available textbooks soon proved to be either more suitable for graduate teaching, too elementary or outdated. I began to develop my own lecture notes and made use of my continuing good contacts with my CSIRO colleagues. Stuart Godfrey came over to Sydney for a one semester sabbatical to teach dynamical oceanography. We agreed that a textbook for undergraduates, while being mostly descriptive, should nevertheless be based on a clear understanding of the physical principles that determine the dynamics of the ocean. Our joint textbook Regional Oceanography: an Introduction came out in 1994 (Tomczak and Godfrey, 1994, 2003). It was a time of great technological change in printing and text delivery—I placed my first full text lecture notes on the web in 1995—and the publishing house informed us Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol.26 page 47

that it intended no longer to typeset its books but planned to move to production from print-ready pages provided by us. At the last moment the decision was changed and we were asked to provide electronic text for processing by the publisher. Proof-reading electronically delivered text was no longer deemed necessary, and when the book finally appeared its text and figures looked good but its equations were no longer recognizable. The other great technological change was of course the Internet. I wrote most of my material during a sabbatical in Kiel and sent what I had written during the day to Stuart in Hobart in the evening. Stuart received it in the morning, added material of his own and emailed the text back to Kiel—a 24-hour production process.

Challenges of the times Regional Oceanography: an Introduction was my last effort to present a science topic to an undergraduate class in the form of textbook chapters. Today’s communication technology, from television to the Internet snippets of Facebook and Twitter, has changed the way students learn, and modern textbooks present their information as short text units craftily arranged in boxes on the page and paired with colourful illustrations. As a columnist for Oceanography, the membership magazine of The Oceanography Society (TOS), I wrote about these and other aspects of oceanography teaching from 2003 until 2006. The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Meeresforschung reprinted my contributions in its membership magazine DGM-Mitteilungen. The Internet did not only change the way of teaching, it turned the classroom into a worldwide audience. I had always felt that scientists from the western world have an obligation to help science in the developing world and have given training courses for United Nations organizations supporting the marine sciences in Malta, Mogadishu, Bangkok and Fiji. When my lecture notes and exercises became available on the web in interactive form they were quickly taken up in all continents, and universities in Barcelona, Cape Town, Hyderabad, Maine and Rio Grande volunteered to mirror my web site on their servers. Graduate students should of course be capable of absorbing research through books written in linear fashion, and teaching them requires a different approach. As a graduate student I had participated in the annual Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Summer Study Program of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA, in 1965. The program (see the video here1), which continues today, exposes the students to two weeks of day-long lectures and then expects them to work for eight weeks on a project of their own and present their results in a seminar at the end. As a university teacher I now dreamt of introducing something similar that would challenge the best students and give them an opportunity to establish a network with leading researchers. Running a ten week summer school was of course impossible in the Australian 1 h t t p : / / w w w. w h o i . e d u / o c e a n u s / v i e w Ar t i c l e . do?id=51026&sectionid=1001

context, but with financial assistance from AMOS and the CSIRO I managed to organise four week-long Australian Climate Research Graduate Summer Schools in 1992, 1995, 1997 and 2000 that brought together promising graduate students from all over Australia with some of the best researchers, including a guest from overseas. After a week of lectures, which the students had to present as a collection of notes at the end of the summer school, the students embarked on mini-projects of their own, guided by summer school staff, and presented their results in a seminar. Several of our well-known and leading climate scientists participated as students or staff in my summer schools and valued the experience highly. Today I see summer schools for climate research advertised every year, but they are in reality symposia held for the benefit of the participating students; hands-on research by the students in projects of their own is rarely part of their concept. A hand-made cricket bat with the dedication “Presented by the students of the First Australian Climate Research Graduate Summer School for use during future summer schools” is still waiting in my office to be picked up by the organiser of the next true summer school.

Spin-off from an international research effort But back to 1984. Australia was about to get its first purpose-built research vessel, the RV Franklin, which allowed it to take greater responsibility in international research programs. It was also the time when concern about the effects of human activity on the Earth’s climate added a new dimension to the various multidisciplinary connections of deep-sea oceanography, through closer relationship with the atmospheric sciences. The Australian Marine Science Association, which I had joined soon after my arrival in Australia, brings together the professional interests of physical oceanographers, marine biologists, geologists and geophysicists but has no links with meteorology. When, in 1985, the Australian Branch of the Royal Meteorological Society set about restructuring itself into a national Australian organization I supported the inclusion of oceanographers and became a founding member of AMOS in 1987. During these years I took Franklin into Australia’s extended waters in the east and south, but when the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) of the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) began its field phase in 1990 and the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA-COARE) became a reality in 1992–1993 I could finally return to longer ocean voyages and reach distant ocean regions. TOGA-COARE was a central part of an international attempt to understand El Niño dynamics. The strongest El Niño signal in the ocean is experienced along the South American coast, in the form of unusually warm water temperatures. For decades it had been assumed that the key to understanding El Niño had to be found in that region. In 1969 Jacob Bjerknes suggested that ocean-atmosphere interaction in the warm pool region Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol.26 page 48

of the western Pacific is responsible for what is now termed the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon. TOGA-COARE brought together ships and aircraft from 20 nations in a coordinated study of the process. Australia’s contribution involved me as one of the principal investigators on RV Franklin’s four-week voyage to the equatorial Pacific. TOGA-COARE also produced, more by accident than by design, my most frequently cited paper. One of the recent discoveries in the western Pacific had been the existence of the so-called “barrier layer” below the surface mixed layer that could inhibit heat exchange with the atmosphere. The TOGA-COARE plan was to achieve close collaboration between participating vessels in a study of the phenomenon, and I had organised the participation of one of my PhD students on board RV Moana Wave of the University of Hawaii, on the understanding that the data collected would form the basis of her thesis. The ships returned home, but what did not arrive were the data. After multiple requests I found out that Moana Wave’s chief scientist had given them to one of his PhD students instead. We now had to come up with a new thesis topic in a hurry. We decided to investigate whether barrier layers also exist in other oceans, using the World Ocean Data Base. The resulting thesis did not only show that barrier layers are found in all three oceans but that the underlying physical mechanisms are different in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Ocean. The resulting paper came out in 1992 and still continues to be cited as a “seminal study” (Sprintall and Tomczak 1992).

Last change of employer 1992 was also the year of my move to Flinders University in Adelaide. A new Department Head for Geology and Geophysics had arrived in Sydney. He was not supportive of oceanography and made life difficult for me. When Flinders University advertised its Chair of Oceanography I decided that there was no future for me in Sydney and applied. In Adelaide, oceanography had been taught as a combined course with meteorology since the 1970s, an educational approach perfectly adapted to the needs of climate change courses, and was supported with six teaching positions. My first years at Flinders University would be as close as I would ever come to the instructional standards of the breadth and depth I had experienced in Kiel. Working at a university changed the way I could access Australia’s deep-water research facility. At the CSIRO, a successful application for ship time on RV Franklin secured allocated time and financial support. University staff have to apply for ship time with the Marine National Facility Steering Committee (MNFSC) and for financial support with the Australian Research Council (ARC), and success with the MNFSC does not automatically guarantee success with the ARC. I continued with my deep-sea research—I was cruise leader on eighteen of RV Franklin’s voyages and the ship’s major user outside the CSIRO—and was mostly successful with my applications, but one voyage was only rescued through an injection of funds from overseas.

As part of Germany’s contribution to WOCE the Institut für Meereskunde of the University of Hamburg had wanted to place a series of current meter moorings across the equator south of Sri Lanka. It had the German RV Sonne at its disposal to deploy them in July 1993 but no ship for their recovery planned for September 1994. One of Australia’s WOCE contributions was the monitoring of the source region for the Leeuwin Current off North West Cape and south of Java. Emails went back and forth, with the result that the study of the Leeuwin current source region and the retrieval of the German moorings were combined into one voyage for RV Franklin from Fremantle to Colombo with me as cruise leader. The MNFSC approved my voyage plan and allocated corresponding ship time, but the ARC six months later rejected my grant application. I emailed my Hamburg colleagues: “I have a ship, but no money.” By that time the moorings were already in place, and the situation looked grim. In the end the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft gave an emergency grant, and RV Franklin could go on its way to Colombo supported by German funds.

Retirement I retired from Flinders University in 2006, after 14 years of teaching under increasingly difficult conditions. Today the number of meteorology and oceanography teaching staff has been cut from six to three and the number of topics taught reduced by more than half. I am rather ambivalent about this. It is of course sad to see something wither for which I had high hopes when I joined Flinders University in 1992. But I grew up in a country where during my student years oceanography was only taught comprehensively in one location, and whoever wanted to study marine science had to come to Kiel. Australia’s population is less than a third of Germany’s, but of all the oceanography courses offered by several universities none, as far as I can see, can be called comprehensive. This will not change until students are prepared to move interstate for studies, which is unlikely to happen soon, given today’s economic climate that forces many young people to stay and live with their parents well into their twenties. Maybe one day Australia will see an oceanographic teaching centre of the same comprehensive coverage of all fields of marine science as its centre of oceanographic research, the CSIRO Marine Laboratories. Being eligible to Emeritus status at your old teaching institution is one of the perks of working in academia.

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Like everything else in life it has its up side and flip side. No longer having to attend school or faculty meetings or to respond to administrative missives from above is a blessing. (How I yearned for the times when a research voyage meant no emails for six weeks!) No longer being called to teach gives a tinge of sadness, but the young people of today are probably better off not being confronted with someone approaching four times their age. The biggest regret is no longer being able to find a reason to take a research vessel to sea and enjoy the wind, waves and wide sky. I did manage a last great voyage in 2008. The Sea Education Association (SEA) of Woods Hole in Massachusetts, USA, invited me to join their teaching program for young people who go on voyages with the association’s sailing training ships. After teaching introductory oceanography for six weeks I joined the brigantine SSV Robert C. Seamans on her six-week voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti. The CTD measurements taken by the students caused me to rethink the dynamics of the barrier layer and led to a paper with two French colleagues in 2009 (Mignot et al., 2009). I still dream of another voyage, under sail or steam (or diesel). People are entitled to their dreams, aren’t they?

References Mignot, J., de Boyer Montégut, C. and Tomczak M., 2009, On the porosity of barrier layers. Ocean Science 5, 379– 387. Sprintall, J. and Tomczak, M., 1992, Evidence of the barrier layer in the surface layer of the tropics, Journal of Geophysical Research, 97, 7305–7316. Tomczak, M., 1981, A multi-parameter extension of TSdiagram techniques for the analysis of non-isopycnal mixing, Progress in Oceanography, 10, 147–171. Tomczak, M. and Garcia Diaz, C., 1975, A numerical model of the circulation in Cienfuegos Bay, Cuba, Estuarine Coastal Marine Science, 3, 391–412. Tomczak, M. and Godfrey, J.S., 1994, Regional Oceanography: an Introduction. Pergamon, Oxford. 422pp. Tomczak, M. and Godfrey, J.S., 2003, Regional Oceanography: an Introduction. (2nd edition). Daya Publishing House, Delhi. 390pp.

Meet a Member

Jorg Hacker Where does this find you? Working from home in our beautiful off-grid place in the Adelaide Hills, processing data sampled during one of our many airborne campaigns and looking at nothing but native bushland around me. However, you could also have found me flying one of our research aircraft just about anywhere over Australia, taking measurements of the landscape below or of the air and what’s in it. What do you do? I am Director and Chief Scientist of ARA—Airborne Research Australia, which is Australia’s National Research Aircraft Facility, hosted within the School of the Environment at Flinders University in Adelaide1. When I am not working from home, I work at our premises at Parafield Airport, where all our research aeroplanes are based in our own hangar/office/lab complex. As with everybody else at ARA, I am involved in just about everything that happens there, including flying our aeroplanes (as scientist and also as pilot), working on the airborne instrumentation or the aircraft itself, processing data, liaising with our collaborators in Australia and overseas, dealing with the “bureaucrazy” and “paper mountain” and finding funding to keep us going as a 100% self-funded entity. I have no doubt that my job is the best one in the world of science and even more generally. During our fieldwork, I see parts of Australia that the “normal” person rarely or never sees, from a perspective that is only accessible to a few “crazy” flyers of small aeroplanes in all sorts of conditions and environments. I work with other scientists from Australia and around the world on exciting projects, covering the atmosphere from very low down, flying at just a few metres above the ground or water to measure turbulent fluxes—sometimes for nearly 500 km—in the Northern Territory, in the wet and dry season; to chasing ultrafine particles emitted from coal-fired power stations all over Queensland; to looking at vegetation and the coastline all around Shark Bay, Hamelin Pool, Faure Sill or Turtle and Montgomery Reefs in Western Australia using our Lidar and hyperspectral scanners; to soaring the incredible Morning Glory Cloud over the Gulf Country near Burketown/far north Queensland using our sensors to study the processes which generate this spectacular phenomenon; to sampling ash particles from the Chilean volcano at FL245 (about 7.5 km altitude) over the southern tip of Tasmania. And if I need a change, I put on my hat as Chief Scientist of the Mountain Wave Project2, go to South America and fly gliders fitted with turbulence sensors to lofty heights of 12.5 km over the Andes to study mountain waves and orographic turbulence. 1

www.airborneresearch.org.au

2

www.mountain-wave-project.de

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And going back a few years—how about flying in the Southern Hemisphere’s only high altitude research aircraft, the two-seater Grob Egrett, up into 15 km in the stratosphere in Darwin at night chasing thunderstorms; or in the morning of the same day flying a flux mission out to 100 km offshore at 10 m above the water to meet the CSIRO’s RV Franklin to measure evaporation from the Arafura Sea in the small ECO-Dimona research aircraft; or sampling trace gases at 45,000 ft over Ireland just below the Tropopause flying out over the Atlantic Ocean with the airliners underneath, returning at 49,000 ft just above the Tropopause measuring what happened to the same trace gases; or testing the dust lidar that eventually ended up on Mars; flying one of the ARA ECO-Dimonas through the dust lidar’s laser beam in a dust storm near Lake Eyre; or taking off from Rockhampton at 2 a.m., also in the small ECO-Dimona and heading for 120 km to the east into the sunrise at 12,000 ft carrying our microwave scanner under the wing that measures the salinity of the water in the Great Barrier Reef; or flying the (slow flying) Egrett daily for two weeks over Mount Fuji and the Sea of Japan to measure turbulence in the jetstream, with the Japanese Air Traffic Control wondering why we are moving “backwards” over the ground (because of the 200kts wind speeds there). Why did you get into it? When I was at high school and started to think of what I would like to do with my life, it was totally clear to me that I wanted to study Meteorology, so that I could learn more for my all-dominating hobby—gliding. But when I then started to study meteorology at the University of Bonn, I realised very quickly that gliding gave me so much more practical knowledge for my studies of meteorology than sitting in a lecture theatre would ever be able to do. The truth is that I learned a lot more from my gliding and flying for my meteorology than the other way round. But what I really wanted was to combine the two—gliding/ flying and atmospheric sciences—and I have succeeded in that far beyond my wildest dreams. What is the best thing about what you do? That is impossible to say! But it is clear that one of them is the combination of going out into nature (in my case mainly the atmosphere) and taking measurements, often in places where no measurements have ever been taken before, using the latest and most environmentally friendly technology, and then going back and look in great detail at the data. Another “best thing” is that over many years now, in many cases, my wife Shakti is “my” mission scientist during my research flights, sitting on the right-hand seat operating the instrumentation. To be able to share the excitement in this way certainly is an incredible bonus.

What did you want to be when you were 10? Airline pilot—absolutely—but I am very happy that this did not work, because in those days, if one had to wear glasses (as I did), one could not become airline pilot. How lucky I was! Spending my life flying large aircraft with many people in them from A to B and back would surely not have satisfied me for long. Instead, more than 30 years ago, I went to Australia to spend one year there as postdoc in Atmospheric Sciences, with no intention to stay—but I am still here.... How do you relax? Reading a book at home, bushwalking in remote areas—in the middle of summer, four-wheel driving long distances

or ferrying one of our research aircraft together with my wife all over Australia—except in July, when I am joining my wife to spend the month in Avignon in Southern France to run (and perform in—not me, my wife) the only non-French speaking theatre (out of about a hundred) at the Avignon Festival OFF. What is your favourite holiday destination? At the moment, home is not a bad option, having just moved into our own little paradise of native Australian bush. But apart from that, the back roads and hiking trails of the Flinders Ranges, such as Wilkawillina Gorge, are another option, as surely are the spectacular gorges of Karijini National Park in north-west Western Australia.

AMOS member Jorg Hacker. Images: Shakti Chakravarty

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Snapshot

“In need of rescue” 18 November 2012 John Allen

A squall line sweeps along the Queensland coast associated with a southerly change, bringing dangerous wind and waves to Noosa main beach during schoolies week and resulting in the closure of the beach. Notice the dark area in the centre of the image where heavy rainfall was occurring. The photo was taken at 4:01 p.m. on Noosa Main Beach, Queensland.

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If you have an image of the weather near you to share, send it to duncan.ackerley@monash.edu, or post it on the AMOS Facebook page. — Ed.

Charts from the Past with Blair Trewin

20 July 1987 The most common scenario for major low-level snowfalls in southern Australia is a deep southerly or south-westerly flow. These typically bring the coldest air to the continent. However, they are also typically dry air masses, and often lack moisture, limiting the total amount of snow. Deep southerlies are also usually associated with subsiding air. An alternative scenario for heavy snowfalls involves an upper-level cold pool interacting with a south-easterly flow. Snowfalls of this type are infrequent, as flows of Tasman Sea origin are usually too warm for snow to low levels. However, when they do occur, they can be substantial; the Tasman, with its warmer sea surface temperatures, is a greater potential source of moisture than the Southern Ocean. A particularly notable example occurred in July 1987. After several days of westerly flow with a slow-moving long-wave trough over South Australia (which brought regular rain to southern parts of that State, with some minor flooding), a cutoff low formed south of South Australia on the 18th. It intensified, with a tight pressure gradient on its western flank, and was centred near Mount Gambier on the 19th, before drifting northeast over inland New South Wales and weakening over the next two days. Ridging to the south directed south-easterlies over eastern Victoria and southern New South Wales, with an upperlevel cold pool over the far south-east of the continent. The air mass was cold enough for snow levels to drop below 600 metres near the NSW-Victoria border, setting the scene for a localised but extreme snow event. The largest falls occurred in a narrow band west and north of Bombala. In this band falls of 60 to 120 cm were commonplace. Bukalong Station, 790 m above sea level,

received 104 cm of snow—easily the largest fall in over 150 years at one of Australia’s longest observing sites. On the 21st the snow depth over level ground was 78 cm, and the cover did not finally melt until early August. The snow caused a number of roof collapses and significant stock losses. Falls were much lighter in the region’s main towns (30 cm at Jindabyne, 12 cm at Bombala), but were still enough to severely disrupt transport. Unfortunately there were no temperature observations at Bombala, but in Victoria maximum temperatures on the 20th included 4.4°C at Omeo, 8.2°C at Orbost and near 7°C at Benalla, Wangaratta and Shepparton. There was a second round of snow further north on the 22nd, this time centred on the Blue Mountains, where falls of 10–15 cm were the heaviest since 1965 in places. Maximum temperatures of 2.4°C at Katoomba and 2.8°C at Lithgow were not far above record low levels. On the coast heavy rain fell, with 82 mm at Cronulla. Earlier, severe winds on the western flank of the low had caused damage in South Australia. A motorist was killed by a falling tree in the Adelaide Hills and a boat sank near Goolwa. Further west, under a strong high-pressure system, unusually low minimum temperatures covered much of the southern half of Western Australia. Albany Airport had its coldest (and only sub-zero) night on record with −0.2°C on the 20th, whilst it fell to −4.4°C at Yeelirrie (south of Wiluna) and Eyre on the 21st.

Synoptic chart for 0000 UTC (1000 AEST), 20 July 1987

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The Research Corner with Damien Irving

Version Control As mentioned in previous Research Corner articles, AMOS and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science hosted a Software Carpentry boot camp earlier this year. The event was a huge success, so I was curious to find out which aspects of the teaching content people had found most usefuI. Of the 30 participants who responded to my online survey (thank you!), 25 felt that version control was a vitally important part of the course. For the benefit of those who couldn’t make it to the boot camp, here’s a brief summary of what a version control system is, and why you should be using one. For those who aren’t familiar, a version control system stores a master copy of all your computer code (e.g. Fortran, Python or shell scripts) in a repository, which you can never edit directly. Instead, you check out a working copy of the repository, edit that copy as you wish, and then commit your changes back to the repository once you’re done. The repository stores the entire revision history of your code, so that you can retrieve and compare previous versions, together with metadata such as comments on what was changed and the author of those changes. Version control systems were originally designed for people developing code in teams, for two main reasons: 1.

It allows everyone in the team access to the most upto-date version of the code (i.e. by checking out the latest version of the repository)

2.

The system prevents people from overwriting each other’s work by forcing them to merge concurrent changes before committing

People soon came to realise, however, that version control is a great idea even if you’re working on your own. For instance, let’s say someone asks to see how you generated Figure 2b in a paper you published three years ago. Without version control, such a request would be very difficult (and stressful). In contrast, armed with a complete history of your code, you could easily pull up the exact version of that plotting script you used all those years ago. Subversion (or svn) and Git are the most widely used version control systems, and are both open source and

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freely available. The fundamental difference is that Subversion is a centralised system, while Git is distributed. There’s a lot of debate about which is better (search “why svn is better than git” or vice versa if you don’t believe me); however, it’s kind of like debating the forehands of Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. Both are great and certainly get the job done. Once you’ve installed Subversion or Git, the next thing you’ll need is a hosting service, which is a web-based service where you can store a copy of your code repository. First and foremost, a hosting service provides an external backup of your code—i.e. if your local system crashes, you won’t lose a thing. In addition to providing a safety net, hosting services also make it really easy to share your code with other people. The associated websites allow you to not only view your code (including visual displays of the difference between old and new versions), but also support bug tracking, release management, mailing lists, and wiki based documentation. Widely used (and free) hosting services include Bitbucket, GitHub, SourceForge and Google Code—again, it doesn’t really matter which one you choose. In fact, many open source software projects in the AMOS sciences (e.g. search “Climate Data Analysis Tools, GitHub”) make their hosting service pages public, so that people can download the latest version of the code, view documentation for the code, post issues/bugs that they find and even contribute code themselves. Often times people like the sound of version control, but find the initial learning curve too steep. In order to combat this problem, the computational modelling support team at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science have put together a great version control tutorial1. By following this tutorial, you’ll have a fully functional version control system up and running in no time!

1 http://walesnix.earthsci.unimelb.edu.au/~mrezny/gitTutorial/ index.html

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 peerreview 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):

t

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. t

t

4.

An abstract is not required; however, should the author(s) wish to produce one it 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:

t

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. t

Books:

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

Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol.26 page 55

Web sites:

Department of Sustainability and Environment, 2012, Bushfire history - Major bushfires in Victoria, www.dse. vic.gov.au/fire-and-other-emergencies/major-bushfiresin-victoria/ 7.

We recommend that the author(s) make at least two suggestions for referees to undertake the peer-review.

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.

2. Method 4. Conclusions

Theses:

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

1. Introduction 3. Results

Book chapter:

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).

Calendar

2013

September

June 17–21 AMS, 19th Conference on Atmospheric and Oceanic Fluid Dynamics, Newport, Rhode Island, USA. 17–21 AMS, 17 Conference on the Middle Atmosphere, Newport, Rhode Island, USA. th

24–28 Asia Oceania Geosciences Society (AOGS) 10th annual meeting, Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre, Brisbane, Australia. 24–28 Chapman Conference: Crossing the Boundaries in Planetary Atmospheres: From Earth to Exoplanets, Annapolis, Maryland, USA. 24–28 19th International Conference on Nucleation and Atmospheric Aerosols, Fort Collins, CO, USA. 26–28 Second Conference on Weather Warnings and Communication, Nashville, TN, USA.

July 5–6 Measurement Problems in Ice Clouds Workshop, Zurich, Switzerland. 8–12 Davos Atmosphere and Cryosphere Assembly (DACA-13) Air, Ice and Process Interactions, Davos, Switzerland.

16–20 EUMETSAT Meteorological Satellite Conference & 19th AMS Satellite Meteorology, Oceanography, and Climatology Conference, Vienna, Austria. 16–20 36th Conference Breckenridge, CO, USA.

on

Radar

Meteorology,

22–26 13th Quadrennial iCACGP Symposium/13th IGAC Science Conference, Natal, Brazil. 26 Expected release of IPCC Working Group I 5th Assessment Report.

October 8–11 Greenhouse 2013, Adelaide Convention Centre, Adelaide, SA. 15–17 10th Symposium on Fire and Forest Meteorology, Bowling Green, KY, USA.

2014 February 2–6 94th AMS Annual Meeting, Atlanta, USA. 12–14 20th AMOS National Conference, Hobart, Australia.

8–12 Mathematics of Planet Earth, Melbourne, Australia.

Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Journal

Articles — Vol 62 No. 4, December 2012 Puri. The Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator, ACCESS: Scientific justification and options.

Taylor et al. Modelling low-level boundary layer structure in complex terrain: verification of TAPM meteorological predictions in the Canberra region.

Irving et al. Climate projections for Australia: a first glance at CMIP5.

Chubb et al. Orographic influence on clouds and precipitation in the Brindabella Ranges.

Ashcroft et al. Temperature variations of south-eastern Australia, 1860–2009.

Le Marshall et al. The application of eadio occultation observations for climate and weather monitoring and numerical weather prediction in the Australian region.

Jovanovic et al. Climate Variations and change evident in high-quality climate data for Australia’s Antarctic and remote island weather stations. Durrant and Greenslade. Spatial evaluations of ACCESS marine surface winds using scatterometer data. Bodman et al. Observational constraints on parameter estimates for a simple climate model.

Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol.26 page 56

Regular features: Webb. Seasonal climate summary Southern Hemisphere (Summer 2011–2012). Wu. Quarterly numerical weather prediction model performance summary—April to September 2012.

2013 AMOS Council Executive

President Vice-President Secretary Treasurer Past President

Blair Trewin Todd Lane Damien Irving Ian Watterson Neville Nicholls

Ordinary Members John Allen Andrew Klekociuk Robin Roberston Sandra Schuster Richard Wardle Perry Wiles

03-8344 9596 03 6232 3382 02-6268 8289 02-9272 8025 03-9905 4411 03-9669 4664

AMOS Administrative Officer

Jeanette Dargaville GPO Box 1289, Melbourne VIC 3001 (attn: AMOS admin officer) Phone 0404 471 143 E-mail: admin_officer@amos.org.au

03-9669 4623 03-8344-6516 03-8344 6911 03-9239 4544 03-9902 0111

Sub-Committee Convenors Public Relations Awards 2014 Conference Education Membership

Centre Chairs NSW Hobart Melbourne ACT Perth Darwin Brisbane Adelaide

Vacant Mark Williams Andrew Marshall Phillip Riley Michael Hewson

0419 519 440 03-6232 5184 03-9669 4530 0408 379 373

Fiona Johnson Kelvin Michael Andrew Ballinger Clem Davis Merv Lynch Hakeem Shaik Andrew Wiebe Andrew MacKinnon

02-9385 9769 03-6226 2977 04-3554-8981 02-6254 2861 08-9266 7540 08-8920 3814 04-5046 0676 08-8313 3875

Representatives AMOJ Science & Technology Australia

David Karoly

03 8344 4698

Steven Phipps

02-9385 8957

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

2013 Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society ISSN 1035-6576

Editor

Duncan Ackerley Monash Weather and Climate School of Mathematical Sciences Monash University VIC 3800 Phone: 03-9902 4900 Fax: 03-9005 4403 Email:duncan.ackerley@monash.edu

Editor-in-chief

Stewart Allen Email: Stewart.Allen@bom.gov.au

Assistant Editors Diana Greenslade Blair Trewin Linden Ashcroft

Regional Sub-editors Michael Hewson (Brisbane) Caecilia Ewenz (Adelaide) Nicholas Tyrrell (Melbourne) Fiona Johnson (NSW) Clem Davis (ACT)

Contributors Blair Trewin Damien Irving

Advertising Manager Please contact the Admin. Officer.

Publisher

AMOS, GPO Box 1289, Melbourne VIC 3001, Australia

Contributed articles, news, announcements and correspondence for the Bulletin should be sent to the editor no later than 19 July 2013. 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 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