WANTED—A GENIUS

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 91, 14 October 1931, Page 7

WANTED—A GENIUS

WEATHER FORECASTING

METEOROLOGIST'S VIEWS

When on rare occasions the Dominion 's Meteorological Office makes a bad tnis3 with its weather forecast, there arc always some who want to rush into print and demand to be told why the experts are not always right and. why we pay for their services if •they eflTinot invariably be depended upon. Weather forecasting iv New Zealand is notoriously difficult owing tv its insular position, much more difficult owing to isolation and situation than it is in England. Those who carp at meteorologists' failures to foreoast accurately upon all occasions would do well to read and ponder what Mr. 13. h. Hawke, meteorological superintendent of the - Hampstead Observatory, says in an. informative article.

Why, ho asks, is there still so large a proportion of failures in our foreoasts? Why, with the mass of up-to-datte and accurate information that is sow regularly received by wireless from all' over the Northern Hemisphere, including the Atlantic, and with tho records of conditions in tho upper air made daily by aeroplanes specially detailed for the purpose, are wo not always able to say how the weather will behave ex-en for so short a period as six hours ahead' 7 The answer must be sought in Sir Oliver Lodge's forty-four years old statement: "No Kepler, no Xewton, hiis as yet arisen to do for meteorology what those intellectual giants did for astronomy."

"The more we know, the less we know we know." Ono of the chief results of nil the study undertaken within tho last two decades has been to reveal an -atmospheric structure of a complexity Unit was previously unsuspected ami can only be described as staggpiin;;. When cyclones and anticyclones were discovered, iv the middle <>( l,i<t century, it was confidently believed that we had been furnished with the key to foreknowledge of the weallir.'i1. But ss the years went on optimism slowly dwindled, and latterly it has bfen replaced by a widespread spirit of pessimism. .In the opinion of one of our foremost authorities there are now indications that progress in. forecasting is coming to a standstill in all countries owing to the extreme difficulty of the subject.

We are not yet. within sight of a full understanding of tho origin of cyclones, while both the mode and tho reason of the formation of anti-cyclones remain obscure. There is,scarcely a "law" in our formulary that is not sometimes broken.

There are now two main schools of thought in the matter of forecasting, says Mr. Hawke. One holds that the weather will eventually prove accurately predictable—perhaps1 even for long periods ahead; tho other believes that it is subject to the "principle of indeterminacy," and that the development of "depressions" must be regarded as no less haphazard than the soinr;what analogous formation of eddies at tho edge of a stream flowing into a millpond. Time alone can show which of these views represents the truth. Tor the present we can only work oil and hope for the best.

Our pessimists maintain that man was not meant to know the future, and never will (forgetting, apparently, that we can already foretell the tides, eclipses, and other natural phenomena): our optimists declare that v/o may even now be on. the brink of epoch-making discoveries, finding in the, history of other sciences evidence that, it is at such times as these that a, Kepler or a Newton is apt to arise. That meteorology stands in sore need of one all are agreed.