Early Days in the Bureau

D. J. (David) Mares was Divisional Meteorologist when I joined the Bureau. I remember him as a benevolent, middle-aged (but still muscular) individual with a shock of curly white hair which the newspapers of the day found photogenic. Any photograph of Davy accompanying a report in the newspaper of an interview with him was likely to show him peering into the clear glass sphere of a sunshine recorder. Invariably the photograph was taken into the sun which transformed his shock of white curly hair into a glowing halo.

Davy loved to chat about meteorology and many times I was privileged, when conveying some minor piece of information to his office, to be given his ideas on how the atmosphere worked. This was the traditional method of training a young potential meteorologist. One learnt about meteorology from more experienced staff or from books. The first formal training classes in the Bureau had commenced in 1937. Davy and his generation of meteorologists learnt about meteorology on the job.

Davy's forecasts for the following day were based on his memory of the weather which had accompanied similar mean sea-level pressure charts which he had analysed in the past. This was the traditional method of weather forecasting used in the 1930s by meteorologists in Australia, and in other countries such as the United States of America (USA) and the UK. It was not all that different from methods used by the colonial meteorologists Russell, Ellery, Todd and Wragge in the later decades of the 19th century. In the late 1800s Todd published a series of 'typical synoptic weather charts' with which he associated various types of significant weather. This was an early example of aids to analogue forecasting.

Bureau of Meteorology