Reginald Sutcliffe and the Invention of Modern Weather Systems Science by Jonathan E. Martin;

Author:Jonathan E. Martin; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2021-05-17T21:00:00+00:00

THROUGHOUT ITS LONG HISTORY the Meteorological Office was periodically subjected to official review of its operations and organization. Another such review, to be chaired by Lord Moore-Brabazon of Tara, was commissioned in late April 1955 in the House of Commons. The charge given the committee of inquiry was “to review the organization of the Meteorological Office in relation to current and future requirements.”57 After some months had gone by, members of Parliament publicly wondered when a report from the Brabazon Committee might be forthcoming. Finally, in March 1956, a first draft appeared, then a second came in June, and finally, in August 1956, the final version of the report was submitted to the Air Ministry.

The committee had held twenty-eight meetings with members of the staff at Dunstable—almost certainly including Sutcliffe—as well as staff at office branches at Harrow, Heathrow, and forecasting offices at some Royal Air Force stations. The report generally shone a favorable light on the office, noting that its standing as a scientific institution and in the eyes of the public had risen in recent years. The committee expressed a desire that the director and his staff would endeavor to “bring home to the universities the challenge which meteorology should present to the imagination of the first-class scientist or mathematician.”58

Among the several specific recommendations made by the committee, one in particular would eventually contribute to the enactment of that very goal. Noting that the office’s branches were scattered in and around London, the committee suggested that “the whole organization would unquestionably gain not only in efficiency but in morale if it could be assembled in one place.”59 As early as November 1954, the new town of Bracknell in Berkshire had been suggested for this very purpose, and the committee was pleased to report that approval had been given to a plan for construction of a new office headquarters there.

Not surprisingly, the Brabazon Report placed particular emphasis on the promise of improvement in forecasting. In fact, the committee regarded it as the “acid test for a meteorological organization costing some £4M to £5M a year.”60 They were optimistic about the promise of NWP and voiced their approval of the recent decision (in November 1955) to grant the office the necessary funds to purchase its computer, named METEOR. It was in the context of this environment of optimism that the Monday evening discussion on March 19, 1956, considered the topic of progress in NWP. The discussion centered on the real-time forecasting experiments that were being carried out in Washington by the JNWPU. The several slides presented by E. Knighting represented unpublished results that Dr. George Cressman of the JNWPU happily shared with the Meteorological Office. Though improvements continued to accrue, problems remained in the treatment of anticyclogenesis (always too robust in the numerical forecasts), the inability to forecast strongly diabatic developments, and a tendency to deepen cyclones too much.61

Bushby described aspects of the work that had been carried out over the past year at the Meteorological Office. They had been

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