THE WEATHER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 370, 26 July 1946, Page 23

THE WEATHER

‘I PREDICT A STORM. By P. H. Jones. Printed for the author by the Gare Publishing Co. Ltd. MRE. JONES may predict a storm, but *"" this book will hardly provoke it, Yet provocation is his avowed purpose. He opens fire on the accepted authorities on the first page of his first chapter, is still firing on the last page of his last chapter, and can’t resist one final shot into space in the appendix. It is no doubt good for the authorities, but it is very bad for Mr. Jones, and a little wearisome for the neutral reader. Mr. Jones’s grievance is that: the Meteorological Office ignores him. Well nobody would like being ignored after making 63,875 personal observations over a period of 25 years, but Mr. Jones strains the imagination when he says that his methods are not known to the official meteorologists "or they would not keep on making the same blunders," His zeal may be unknown, his patience, his painfully acquired weather sense, but if his methods are unknown it can only be because he has not succeeded very well in demonstrating their value. He begins an ex- position, but is as likely to wander off on a side-track as to go on with the lesson. Take Chapter 7, for example: "Otago Observations." He begins with a joke about Dunedin weather, goes on to say ‘that "the late A. C. Hanlon discussed weather problems with me one afternoon until well after office hours," explains how he discovered "about this time" a very simple method of charting the complete history of a storm on one graph, ymet Sir Hubert Wilkins, missed a chance of getting one of his Predictors "to the Pole with Byrd," found a terminological inexactitude in 4 work compiled by a world authority, and finally quotes "a remarkable result achieved at Tarras, Central Otago," by

an amateur using the same method as his own, There may be an importance in all this that other amateurs cannot detect, but on the face of things it suggests that Mr. Jones, who sets out to be a thorn in the flesh of the orthodox, succeeds only in making it clear why the Weather Office goes on ignoring him.