In August 1976 the government decided to hasten the review process by establishing an ad hoc Committee of Inquiry into the Bureau of Meteorology. Chaired by Phillip Howson OBE, this Committee was to report[39] and make recommendations on a number of matters, including:

• the objectives of the Bureau of Meteorology and the relevance, to present and future requirements of Australia, of the functions of the Bureau as set out in the Meteorology Act 1955;


• the extent to which the current activities and the emphasis given those activities accord with the objectives recommended for the Bureau; and


• the relationship of the Bureau with other government agencies, and with institutions involved in related scientific work.

The Committee took little more than three months to complete its task. This was despite the fact that there had been some 300 responses to the earlier Green Paper. In its report[39], the Committee expressed surprise in discovering that there were four organisations, the Bureau, CSIRO'S Divisions of Atmospheric Physics and Cloud Physics, and ANMRC undertaking major meteorological research on behalf of the Commonwealth Government. It recommended that the ANMRC be brought back into the Bureau at the expiry of the existing agreement, with its work on numerical modelling being taken up by Bureau staff, if this was still considered relevant at the time.

Bureau of Meteorology