BAMOS 9
The importance of plotted time sections can’ t be over-estimated; stations on Antarctica and the islands of the Southern Ocean( Macquarie, Campbell, Marion, Heard and Crozet) were vital. These were used to analyse the passage of fronts and infer the existence of larger scale systems. We used to build up an analysis based on conceptual models of frontogenesis and frontolysis consistent with Australian observations and island and Antarctic time sections. We learned from Jack Langford how to track the passage of cold outbreaks from the Antarctic time sections. Sometimes the forecasts for Tasmania were very good, at other times terrible and sometimes the outbreak would affect New Zealand instead. Huge emphasis was placed on temporal continuity and an important part of the( then sole) senior forecaster was to re-analyse the Southern Ocean chart to ensure continuity and consistence with later data.
Warm fronts were a feature of Southern Ocean analysis and I am sure that we overdid them. During the 1960s there seemed to be frequent complex lows over the Tasman Sea and, in the absence of satellite pictures( pre-1968), I used to analyse rotating occluded fronts from Tasman Sea lows to try to pick the onset of heavy rain over eastern and northeastern Tasmania.
The work of the South Africans( Taljaard and van Loon) was important as well as case studies in American, European and Japanese journals.
— Peter Noar.
Already during the early years of the War, however, forecasters were becoming acutely aware of the inadequacies of the frontal model, especially in the tropics, and of the greater value of the diurnal cycle and convergence zones as forecast aids. When the Tropical Analysis Section from the former Allied Headquarters in Brisbane was brought together with AMFA as the Central Analysis Office( CAO) in Melbourne in 1946, there were protracted debates amongst the different analysis schools and individual analysts such as Reg Clarke, Henry Phillpot, Bill Gibbs, John Hogan, John Lillywhite and Neil McRae which continued robustly for more than a decade( Clarke, 1954; Bath and Gibbs, 1956). Although Bill Gibbs had slightly backed off his earlier disenchantment with fronts in the tropics and found the frontal model useful in pioneering synoptic analysis of the Southern Ocean, he was later( Gibbs, 1960) to describe the frontal model as‘ a delusion and a snare …’ At the same time, the South African Weather Bureau was undertaking its far-sighted Southern Hemisphere Atmosphere Project as a lead-in to the Southern Ocean analysis for the International Geophysical Year. Taljaard( 1972) provides a nice summary of the vigour of the Australian and international debate on Southern Ocean analysis models in the decade or two after the War.
— John Zillman( 2021).
A significant stimulation also came from the flood of scientific papers and textbooks which became available towards the end of the war and in the early post-war years. An outstanding example of these scientific papers was that of R. C. Sutcliffe( 1947) which opened new vistas of atmospheric mechanisms, particularly the importance of vertical profiles of divergence in the development of weather systems. Although we had encountered the notion of divergence in our training course in 1940, and in the textbooks of Petterssen and Brunt, Sutcliffe ' s paper was of such elegance, comprehensibility and obvious relevance to the work of the practising forecaster that it had widespread appeal.
— Bill Gibbs( 1999).