RANK HAS HIS OWN WEATHER PROPHETS

Wanganui Chronicle, 12 April 1948, Page 6

RANK HAS HIS OWN WEATHER PROPHETS

In 1946, the British film magnate, Mr. J. Arthur Rank, found the weather was making films unnecessar y costly. Film units which went out to make open-air shots often had to sit around doing nothing because it rained. He decided to set up his own company for long-range weather forecasting, and chose Colonel Irving Parkhurst Krick, one of General Eisenhower's weather experts who selected June 6, 1944, as favourable for D-Day, as managing director. Colonel Krick, who is Professor ot Meteorology at the Camornian Institute of Technology, is sxpecteu to leave America shortly to install for Mr. Rank a similar weather forecasting organisation in Australia. Mr. Ranks Englr-.n company, the International Meteorological Consultant Service, does not forecast for Mr. Rank’s film companies alone. It sells its weather service to fanners, telling them when to reap their crops before .v,nd and rain spoil them. It helps electricity companies to estimate their loading according to weather prospects, and warns dairies when a warm spell is coming and likely to turn the milk sour.

It lets pigeon fanciers know what flying conditions will be like, and it advises golf ciubs and other sporting t bodies of suitable days foi their major events, but the service rarely makes longer than 24-hour forecasts for the film industry, for which it claims 80 pet cent, accuracy. The service’s London laboratory is in charge of Mr. George L. Hogben, a 33-year-old New Zealand Rhode' Scholar, who went to New College Oxford, for a science course and joined the R.N.V.R. as an officer. He served in the North African landings before he became a meteorological commander.

Among his technicians at the non don laboratory axe radio operators who listen all round the clock to weaer data broadcast from all over Europe. They are so skilled they write symbols direct o»i weather maps from morse signal.