Thursday, 20 March 2003
MEDIA RELEASE - HEAD OFFICE
Climate problem still not solved
Regional climate prediction remains an important unsolved problem for science, according to
the Director of Meteorology and President of the World Meteorological Organization, Dr John
Zillman. Dr Zillman, who has led Australian delegations to the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) for the past decade, will deliver the 2003 World Meteorological Day
Address on Our Future Climate at the Bureau of Meteorology Headquarters in Melbourne tomorrow.
World Meteorological Day marks the coming into force of the Convention of the World Meteorological
Organization on 23 March 1950. This year’s focus on Our Future Climate is aimed at drawing
attention to the importance of increasing the skill of seasonal and longer term forecasting
of climate, especially periods of drought such as has been affecting most of Australia over
the past year; and improving the reliability of the climate models used for exploring the likely
implications of greenhouse gas increases on future global climate.
“While we have some skill in seasonal forecasting of the impacts of El Niño and other anomalous
patterns of ocean temperature, the long-term implications of greenhouse warming will be much
harder to determine at the regional or local level,” Dr Zillman says. “Not only will the rate
of global warming depend critically on how the greenhouse gas emissions evolve over the coming
decades, but our models still have a long way to go before they will be capable
of providing reliable information on the likely regional patterns of climate change.”
Dr Zillman has been Director of the Bureau of Meteorology since 1978. He spent much of his earlier
career in climate research and served as co-editor of a 1978 textbook on climate change in the
Southern Hemisphere, well before greenhouse warming had become an issue. In recent years, he has
played a key role in guiding the preparation of the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report that was
released in 2001.
Dr Zillman’s World Meteorological Day Address will be made tomorrow, Friday 21 March, at 11.45am in Conference
Room 1, 5th floor, 150 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne. The Address will be preceded by welcoming remarks
and the presentation of Bureau Excellence Awards and Long-service certificates, starting at 11.15am.
Lunch and refreshments will be available at 12.30pm, after Dr Zillman’s address.
This year’s Individual Excellence Award will be presented to supervising meteorologist Steve Pendlebury,
of the Tasmania and Antarctica Regional Office, for his operational work and studies into the weather
of the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. The Group Excellence Award will be presented to the Monitoring
Unit of the National Climate Centre, which is responsible, among other things, for the monitoring
and prediction of the El Niño/La Niña cycle and Australia’s rainfall and temperature.
A press kit containing a copy of Dr Zillman’s speech, the booklet The Greenhouse Effect and Climate Change,
and a poster to mark World Meteorological Day will be available from the Bureau’s Public Affairs
unit on Friday.
Ends
Further information:
Mark Jenkin, Public Affairs, Bureau of Meteorology,
tel: (03) 9669 4552 (after 8.45am),
e-mail: pro@bom.gov.au
Dr Zillman will be available for brief, in-person interviews after his address tomorrow, and again after 3.30pm.
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