History of Davis

Davis ANARE station

On 13 January 1957, a small ceremony was held to officially open the new Antarctic station "Davis". Dr Philip Law said on the day that the title honoured 'Captain John King Davis, a famous Antarctic navigator and captain'.

Davis has been the site of regular surface and upper air weather observations since 1957, except between January 1965 and February 1969 when the station was closed to allow concentration of the Australian Antarctic Division's resources on the building of Casey station as a replacement for Wilkes.

Weather observations include surface three-hourly synoptic observations, and an upper air sounding program which provides upper air data at 12 hourly intervals. When DigCORA was introduced in the mid 1990s it operated radiosondes that used the Omega VLF signals for upper wind calculation. This method proved unreliable for wind finding at Davis due to the location of Omega transmission stations, so the WF2 wind finding radar was moved from Mawson. It became operational on 27 June 1994 and operated for several years until the introduction of GPS radiosondes. The current Digicora uses GPS radiosondes which compute upper winds using the GPS navigation system as well as measuring the pressure, temperature and moisture at upper levels of the atmosphere to a height of 22 km.

An Ozonesonde program at Davis commenced on the 20 February 2003. (During November to May, an Ozonesonde is released once a month, from June to October, once a week).

High pressure gas generation was used on station to produce the hydrogen required to inflate the weather balloons until March 1993, where due to safety concerns, commercial gas cylinders were introduced. Early in 1994 an electrolyser was installed as an alternative method for the production of Hydrogen.

Observers moved to a new Met building during January 1994, with the first upper air flight from the building occurring 12z 31 January 1994