Research

During the Timcke years all research staff were engaged on tasks closely related to the improvement of forecasting and warning services and to investigations required for special services to those sectors of Government and other organisations requiring advice on meteorological impacts on their area of responsibility.

All meteorologists, weather officers, engineers, technical officers and others providing Bureau services, irrespective of their location in field or Divisional Offices or Central Office needed to improve their basic scientific understanding of the specific area in which they worked. Bureau staff learnt of technological and scientific aspects in these areas by consulting Bureau and other scientific publications while carrying out their routine duties.

Those providing forecasts and warnings needed to know more of the processes which created floods and bushfires, the manner in which tropical cyclones developed, how flooding of coastal areas could result from a storm surge caused by a tropical cyclone, and the manner in which fogs, frosts, overcast low cloud, thunderstorms, hail and gales developed.

Those in the Instrument Section, and those concerned with the maintenance of equipment in the field needed to improve their understanding of new technologies and scientific developments.

Good use was made of the Bureau's Central Office library which was the responsibility of an efficient young lady called Genevieve Carey, a graduate of the University of Melbourne and a trained librarian. Meticulous in her dress, brisk in manner but having a delightful sense of humour, Genevieve ensured that her library had a complete stock of the latest overseas books and journals in addition to earlier publications of relevance.

Many of us who had served in the RAAF Meteorological Service received a post-war 'tools-of trade' grant with which we had purchased the latest overseas textbooks in meteorology. These included Holmboe, Forsythe and Gustin's Dynamic Meteorology (1945) which, through its use of vectors, made it much easier for me to gain a pictorial view of the mathematics involved in the equations of motion of an atmosphere on a rotating Earth.

Bureau of Meteorology