“PROJECT CANTERBURY”

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 73, Issue 6282, 16 September 1946, Page 3

“PROJECT CANTERBURY”

VITAL RESEARCH ON RADAR ; BEGUN “Project Canterbury,” in which radar experts from Great Britain and New Zealand are engaged, and for which the United States provided some of the equipment, has entered its first week of trials, and it is hoped shortly to commence full-scale field research. The main units of “Project Canterbury ” are a station in the foothills of the Southern Alps, a central station in Ashburton, main radar installations at the mouth of the Ashburton River, and a small naval vessel out at sea.

In “Project Canterbury” the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, which is conducting the operation, has virtually an out-door laboratory. Search had been made for suitable localities in the British Isles and in the Mediterranean, but it remained for the uninterrupted sweep from the Southern Alps across the Canterbury Plains and out to sea, with no turbulent conditions to disturb its stream-lined nor’-wester, to provide the ideal conditions for this important undertaking. A simple explanation of the undertaking is this: Radar beams can echo back from, objects to great distances—the Japanese wehe heard 100 miles away at Pearl Harbour—but they cannot go through an obstacle. Nor, in the normal course, can they follow the curvature of the earth over the horizon. In special weather conditions, however, the beam is, as it were, “ bent,” and not only can curvature of the earth be followed for a certain distance, but the ordinary range of a set may be lengthened considerably. The varying conditions of humidity and temperature in the lower layers of the atmosphere, which give rise to the lengthening of radar range, and known technically as “ anomalous propagation,” occur frequently in “ fohn ” winds. In this category fall in varying degrees of applicability the sirocco of North Africa, the chinook of Canada, certain v(inds of China and Japan, the Waimea wind in Nelson, and, perhaps more suitable of all, the Canterbury nor’--wester. These winds seem to provide a duct, funnel, or channel along which the radar signals carry to the exceptional ranges. No satisfactory theory has been advanced for this phenomenon; to do so is part of the object of “Project Canterbury.”