THE OCEAN AND CLIMATE.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 12662, 23 January 1904, Page 4

THE OCEAN AND CLIMATE.

PROFESSOR GREGORY’S LECTURE. At the meeting of the Australasian Association at Dunedin Professor Gregory, F.K.S., of Melbourne, gave a lecture on “The Southern Ocean and its Climatic Control Over Australasia.” Professor Gregory, whose lecture was throughout illustrated by limelight tables of information, referred to tiie excellent work accomplished by the authorities on the Voldivia and the Challenger and to the researches carried on by them, which served to establish the depth of the ocean’s bed in the far south and the trend of the currents. His reference to the movements of the oceans further north and their effects on different lands were very interesting. Speaking of currents, he said they varied at different periods of the year and it was now pretty well established that they varied from one year to another, and that they flowed on different lines in different years, and that there was every reason to believe that these irregular movements of the sea were the main cause of the irregular variations of the seasons on land. The Grail of meteorology was the key to the succession of good and bad seasons. The highest aim of meteorology was to determine whether there was any regular succession of wet and dry periods, and if there be, the discovery of the law that regulated them. Belief in ordered, regular weather cycles had existed at least since the time when Joseph made the family fortune by predicting the seven lean and seven fat years in Egypt, and turning \t to good account by his system of preferential trade. The search for the secret of Joseph’s success had engaged the attention of ambitious men from that day to this. After making lengthy reference to weather records, the effect of sun spots, weather cycles, and other cognate topics, the lecturer said: We have thus seen how changes in the Southern Ocean may affect the Australian climate; that it is clearly recognised thaf movements in the Southern Ocean determine some of the most important events in the Indian weather; and that it is claimed that the earlier discovery of the Lockyer’s law would have enabled all the Indian famines of the last century to have been accurately foretold. Meteorology in Australia is far behind that of India, and will require to make up much ground before Australia is in the same position of vantage as India. The continent which gave meteorology that powerful agent of research —the Hargreave’s kite—is the only continent which has not employed it for meteorological work. Professor Schuster, in a recent address to the British Association deplored the conservatism of meteorological work. He declared that meteorologists were enslaved to continuity; that the brilliant progress in the science during the past few years has been achieved not by meteorologists at their observatories, but, in spite of them, by experimental work along fresh lines. If Schuster could make such complaints in Europe, one wonders in what terms he would express his opinions on the condition of meteorology elsewhere. It is not the fault of our meteorologists, who have done wonderfully well with the means at their disposal. Federal Australia wants a united meteorological service, working on a uniform plan and publishing uniform records; and that service should iiavc a sufficient staff to fully and promptly use the data collected, and sufficient money to undertake experiments outside the ordinary routine of observatory work. Such a service, to be efficient, must be as elastic and as free from red tape rules as a Government department can be. Its officers must carry on their work animated by a love of scientific research, and not in a spirit of business routine. Proposals have been made to introduce into Central Australia a sheet of salt water, which, though large enough to be somewhat costly, would be small in comparison to the vast waterless plains it is proposed to benefit. But in the summer, when rain would be the most good, the country is often already covered with a vast sea of water- Day after day in the summer of 1901-2 the districts around Lake Eyre lay under a heavy pall of morose grey cloud. The fall of one tithe of that sea of moisture would have broken the long spell of drought which had laid that country waste. The clouds at times descended, as if endeavouring to reach the earth; but the ground was too war n, and they were repelled again to the sky. More than once we had a few drops of rain, which showed that the clouds were so near the precipitating point that the slightest impulse would have upset the balance and brought down heavy rain. How high those clouds were above us, how thick they were, how much their temperature was above the precipitating point we could not tell—no one knows. As I watched those clouds drifting steadily overhead, I used to long for a meteorological kite to sound that great sea of moisture, and I dreamt of the time when kites would spray those clouds with liquid air and discharge their now wasted contents on to the wasted plains below. Few investments offer Australia a higher return than meteorological research; but to be successful that research must be conducted patiently and on well-con-sidered lines; it must sound the ocean of air and floats above us and must watch, by the collection of water samples, tho fundamental changes in the circulation of the seas around our shores. In the Southern Ocean the' conditions are so much simpler than those of the North Atlantic that we may expect much greater certainty in weather predictions. I see nothing to prevent future Australian meteorologists foretelling correctly a year ahead the general nature of the approaching seasons. But such insight will never come to us until we have done our part and studied the hydrography of the Southern Oceah with the same methods which have yielded such profitable results in the North Atlantic.