Chain of Radio

Stations Collecting Weather Reports for Islands Aircraft.

IMPORTANT expansions of the facilities for compiling meteorological inform ation for aircraft in Central and Western Pacific are to be made as a re sult of the International Meteorological Conference held in New Zealand at the end of last year.

For the New Guinea service, which is scheduled to commence late in March, a first-class weather station will be open ed at Port Moresby (Papua), with second ary stations at Townsville, Cooktown and Rabaul. The principal forecasting sta tion will be Townsville, where two men will be stationed. At the others, there will, at first, be only one officer.

Work at these stations will include ordinary observations for transmission to planes every half hour, upper air observa tions three times a day, and forecasting for the route on the basis of general advice from the central bureau at Mel bourne, where more detailed analysis of the weather position is possible.

Stations will be opened later on Lord Howe Island and Norfolk Island for the use of aircraft on th,e proposed Australia -New Zealand flying-boat service. In addition, supplementary reports for these aircraft will be provided by two observers, to be stationed permanently on ships which regularly cross the Tasman Sea, The Conference urged that Australia should co-operate with New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa, and the Dutch East Indies in collating weather reports. It was stressed that stations should be established at the Solomons, New Hebrides, Suva, Canton Island, Rarotonga, Nukualofa, Apia, and Sunday Island. The Samoan station would obtain information from Howland Island, Kingman Reef and Jarvis Island.