President’s Column, April 2010
Fri, Apr 23 2010

I want to start this month’s letter with my congratulations to Vaughan Barras, the Chair of the Melbourne Regional Centre and, with Luke Garde, the “guardian” of the AMOS Weather Tipping Competition. This year the Competition has gone “national” and is now hosted on the AMOS web site. A complete redesign of the Competition web page has been supervised by Vaughan and it is now very professional and easy-to-use. Even I have entered this year (and after three weeks I am running 45th of 70 participants). Although the Competition has already started you can still join in, and see if you can beat the official Bureau of Meteorology forecasters.

I also want to welcome Linden Ashcroft who is taking over from Stewart Allen as Editor of the AMOS Bulletin. Linden has completed a Graduate Diploma in Science Communication at ANU and has recently commenced postgraduate study at Melbourne University with Joelle Gergis. Stewart has done an excellent job as Editor for over two years, and will continue to provide advice to Linden as she takes up the reins. Linden, with Jeanette and Stewart, has exciting plans for the future of the Bulletin.

We have been negotiating with the New Zealand Meteorological Society regarding having our annual conference for 2011 in Wellington, in cooperation with MSNZ. The dates have now been set as 9-11 February 2011. The organising and programme committees are being established and details such as registration costs, social program, and accommodation options are being examined. I hope to see many AMOS members in Wellington in February, as well as catching up with our friends and colleagues across the “ditch”.

Members in academia will be aware of the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Initiative. This initiative aims to rank all disciplines at Australian universities relative to world-best practice in research, and against other Australian universities. One tool that will be used to assess the quality of research will be a citation analysis focussed on high-quality, highly-cited journals. It was disturbing to find out, therefore, that the Monthly Weather Review has been omitted from the ERA list of ranked journals. This was apparently because the Australian Research Council, which is carrying out the ERA for the Federal Government, was advised that MWR was not peer-reviewed. On behalf of AMOS, I pointed out that the advice to the ARC was incorrect, and asked that MWR be included in the ERA ranked list. Its omission would seriously bias the ERA results and prejudice funding for universities where academics publish in this journal.

Finally, I want to acknowledge all the hard work that has been put into straightening out our financial statements for the last two financial years. We had extra requirements placed on our financial reporting in 2008, and our systems were not adequate to provide the quality of financial reporting required of us by law. This was not surprising – our financial turnover had grown very quickly. To straighten out the financial statements required hard work by Robin Robertson, Ailie Gallant, Blair Trewin, Susan Karoly, and Jeanette Dargaville, as well as the purchase of financial software and the part-time employment of a bookkeeper. This has cost us, but it was pleasing to see the properly audited financial statements for 2008 and 2009 presented and approved at a Special General Meeting on 16 April. We hope that all this work will mean that the preparation of financial statements in future years will be much simpler and faster.

Neville Nicholls
April 2010