FORECASTING WEATHER

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 219, 16 August 1937, Page 8

FORECASTING WEATHER

SIR H. WILKINS’S PLANS. For 15 years Sir Hubert Wilkins has been urging the establishment or Antarctic weather stations as an aid to long-range weather forecasting in the Southern Hemisphere. Now at last the idea has received official blessing, although details are not yet settled. . In an interview, in London, Sir Hubert Wilkins, referring to the report of the Polar Committee of the Imperial Conference on the establishment of meteorological stations, said that five stations would be needed. South America needed one at Cnarcot Island, or possibly better still at Coatsland, and South Africa needed one in Enderby Land. Sir Hubert hoped that the Commonwealth might establish one a Gaussltfnd or Kaiser Wilhelm Land, and that New Zealand would have one at Ross Island, in the Ross bea, where they had the advantage that records over a number of years were available from the work of expedlA fifth station should bo established somewhere on the Pacific side of the Antarctic, but it was difficult to tincl a site. . t) i Possibly Australia might use Balleny Island as a site, especially it, as the report suggested, two stations were established. It had been suggested that a station might be established also at Kerguelen Land or some other sub-Antarctic island. The Director of the Australian Meteorological Office, • Sir George Simpson, had held that it was most desirable that the stations be actually in the Antarctic or on the edge or the continent. , , . Sir Hubert pointed out that because of the westerly winds, a station at Enderby Land might interest tho Commonwealth as much as it concerned South Africa. , If South America would build one station and each of the British Dominions 111 the Southern Hemisphere one, they should, as Sir George Simpson had suggested, greatly ® P weather forecasts in the Southern Hemisphere and possibly throughout the world.