Keeping a Weather Eye Open

Have you noticed how seldom you hear people complaining about the weather forecasts these days? It seems only yesterday that no strong wind, freak hailstorm or lashing rain thundering out of a towering cumulonimbus was not followed by public or private outcry: “How could they get it so wrong?” As the Bureau of Meteorology prepares to celebrate the centenary of its creation by amalgamation of the former state colonial weather services, its forecasters must be reflecting on how much more enjoyable life has become since they have been able to concentrate on their science, instead of defending themselves against endless public complaints.

When I grew up in Queensland, everyone on the land, and many in its cities and towns, placed more faith in the long-range forecasts of the maverick pseudo-scientist Inigo Jones and his acolyte and successor, Lennox Walker, than in the daily bulletins issued by the Brisbane Weather Bureau. Perhaps it was that mysterious something in the Australian psyche which has always felt attracted to the underdog that made them so supportive of Jones in his little observatory, on his farm at Cromanhurst, just north of Brisbane. It certainly would not have been an understanding of his arcane correlation of observed rainfall data with the planetary cycles of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and the electromagnetic influence of sunspots. Without any idea what he meant, farmers took on faith Jones’s assertion that they would suffer drought when sunspot activity declined as the sun moved through space to the point of celestial longitude known as the Eighteenth Hour of Right Ascension. Few would have heard of, let alone read, his book My Nephelo-Coccygia and I doubt if anyone could have spelled it.

A couple of decades passed before the concept of the Southern Oscillation, first observed way back in the early twentieth century by Gilbert Walker, Director-General of British Observatories in India, replaced Jones’s sunspots as the explanation for Australia’s cycles of drought and flooding rain. Now nightly television weather reports chronicle the fluctuations of the Southern Oscillation Index, signalling the atmospheric pressure differences between Tahiti and Darwin. And every schoolchild knows that a negative SOI means El Niño is bringing drought to Australia, and bumper anchovy catches to the fishermen of Peru.

Today the technologies available to the Bureau enable its forecasters to peer at the world from space, monitor solar radiation, measure the extent of sea ice in the Antarctic, and scan the countryside for storms from fifty-six radar stations across the continent. Even more amazingly, the output from all these observations is available to every one of us, with a few mouse clicks at our computers.

But I digress. For much of its life, the Bureau of Meteorology was everybody’s aunt sally, and it was not only the application of science and technology that improved its hit rate and its image. This is the story of how I contributed, unwittingly, and at great personal risk, to the improvement of its forecasts, half a century ago.

In 1953 the ABC posted me to Longreach, in the heart of central western Queensland sheep country as its Regional Journalist. Nobody else had wanted the job, 800 miles from Brisbane, in the flies, dust and heat, but it was a welcome opportunistic promotion for a twenty-one-year-old cadet. Alone in that office, daily life was a delicate balance between apprehension as to how I was going to collect the seven minutes of news I had to read every night, and a sense of exultation at having the whole of western Queensland as my personal territory. For those tens of thousands of square kilometres, I was the ABC, and the responsibility was both daunting and thrilling.

Weather soon became an issue. The Brisbane Weather Bureau sent a telegram every afternoon with the forecasts for the following twenty-four hours. My instructions were to read it as the last item in the bulletin, but it wasn’t very long before the discrepancy between the forecast and the actuality became obvious. I kept a log for several months and proved to my own satisfaction that weather events always occurred twelve hours earlier than the Brisbane forecast predicted. Then a grazier friend who was one of the first in the district to have his own private plane tipped me off. “Ring Charleville if you want the real weather,” he offered laconically. So I did, thus beginning an almost daily conversation with the forecasters stationed at the Charleville aerodrome, whose principal duty was to issue route weather information to pilots.

A weather story written in simple language, explaining the what, why and most importantly, the when, became a feature of my bulletin when changes were in the air. And I became reasonably adept at judging just when to phone Charleville, by watching the sky for changes in pressure. As I travelled the outback, I passed the word around, through graziers’ meetings and shire councils: “Ignore the official Bureau forecast, listen to the weather story in the bulletin.”

I had found a subtle way of overcoming the problem, without being able to solve the underlying puzzle. The Charleville Met office and the Brisbane Bureau shared the same charts, drawn from the same data from the network of reporting stations around Australia. Yet they drew completely different conclusions and issued forecasts that were half a day apart in timing. Several times, my story based on the Charleville forecasts with early warning of storm rains gave graziers time to muster their sheep from the channels and get them to higher ground before floods came down. The whole of western Queensland quickly cottoned on to the subterfuge. Of course, my ABC management knew nothing of this initiative, nor did the Bureau of Meteorology in Brisbane.

Until 1955. In July that year, heavy rains fell throughout western Queensland as the official Brisbane Bureau forecasts read: “Fine, with some cloud along western border.” By the time the front and its rains had passed the following day, the forecast had become: “Fairly general rain in western and central districts with light to heavy falls …” This was too much for me. I wrote a three-page letter to the Deputy Director of the Bureau in Brisbane, Mr B.W. Newman, detailing the disparity between his forecasts and the weather as experienced.

“Unfortunately this instance, clear though it is, is not an isolated case in the history of weather forecasting for the western areas,” I intoned, pompously. And went on:

“In the unprecedented May floods, a quarter of a million sheep were lost in Western Queensland, and I go so far as to say that a large share of the responsibility for this loss must fall on the shoulders of the Commonwealth Meteorological Service, for its failure to give any warning whatsoever of the approach of rain.”

What had frustrated and angered me was that those rains had fallen at the weekend, when I was off duty and there was no bulletin to tell the real story.

This lecture would probably have been enough to earn me a sharp rebuke from my News Editor, but what really put the cat among the pigeons was my concluding shot at Newman:

“I have to inform you that from next week, I will not include your forecasts in my evening news bulletins. I feel that the people of Western Queensland, who depend perhaps more than any other rural area of the state on as accurate and reliable forecasts as possible, are being denied any benefit from the weather forecasting service.”

The News Editor fired off an urgent telegram ordering me not to be so bloody stupid, and followed with a memo declaring himself “disturbed” at my impudence at writing to another authority. The ABC’s Queensland Manager, David Felsman, then wrote that he was “quite astounded” that I “should have done such a thing”, and I held my breath for the punishment.

But before sentence could be passed, Mr Felsman was rocked by receiving a letter from one of my grazier friends and weather campaign supporters. John Heussler was Secretary of the Graziers Association branch at Morella, near Winton, and wrote to praise the ABC for my efforts to obtain more accurate forecasts, as evidenced, he helpfully pointed out, by my letter, published in the Longreach Leader. This was a generous, but unfortunate tribute, as I had neglected to tell Mr Felsman that in a surge of hubris, I had given the local newspaper a copy of the Newman letter. By then, messages of support and approbation were coming in to me from all over my territory, but I knew they wouldn’t help.

Nothing happened for the most anxious two weeks of my life, and it was only much later that I learned I’d been saved by Dave Felsman’s sense of humour. Apparently he thought the whole thing was a huge joke and a deserved kick in the shins for the weather bureau. He let me down with a statesmanlike reprimand which rang in my ears for the next twenty years of my career: “You have learned two important lessons … we cannot always espouse the causes of sections of the community, and … an indiscretion of the order of yours can only be made once in a professional lifetime.”

Just how did this escapade improve weather forecasting for the west? Mr Newman did not reply to my letter, of course, but a couple of months later, he toured western Queensland, holding public meetings in every town to ask what the locals thought of the forecasting service. In Longreach, I was pushed forward as spokesman for the district, and found myself in an awkward position. I had to attack the accuracy of the Brisbane forecasts, without dobbing in my Charleville contacts. Newman, in a generously civil manner, ignored my correspondence and listened intently, but I suspected that he had been wised up to the inside story. (In any case, this was not the first time he had had to defend the service against an irate public. In 1946, he had responded to a letter in the Sydney Morning Herald accusing the Bureau of incompetence in failing to forecast a deluge.) In due course, he issued an edict that forecasts for western Queensland would henceforth by issued by the Cloncurry regional office. The accuracy improved; the west was satisfied. Today, the ABC’s 4QL transmitter broadcasts forecasts compiled by the Longreach weather office.

Then, in 1957, the Bureau established a Hydrometeorological Section to provide specific flood forecasts and river height information. This was announced as the government’s response to the severe flooding in eastern Australia, but I know it was really due to my impertinent letter to Bernie Newman.