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History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

 

179 

 

 

 

Assembling the Weather: 
Expertise, Authority and the Negotiation of trans-Tasman Aviation Forecasts 

 
 

Matthew Henry 
m.g.henry@massey.ac.nz 

Massey University 
 

 

 

Abstract  

 

The tyranny of distance has always figured significantly in accounts of New Zealand’s 
place in the world. In these accounts the emergence of new technologies: steam ships, 
telegraph cables, refrigeration, satellite connections, and aircraft have all transformed 
New Zealand’s geographies of connection. Aviation in particular has been celebrated the 
technology par excellence in drawing New Zealand closer to the rest of the world. Yet 
these celebratory tales of technological success gloss over the practical work of 
technoscientific assemblage that has made possible new, and enduring forms of 
connection. This paper focuses on the assemblage of aviation routes across the Tasman 
Sea between New Zealand and Australia in the late 1930s. Central to the making of this 
airspace was the concomitant development of specific meteorological networks that 
would transform the Tasman into a forecastable weatherspace. The paper identifies the 
layers of sociotechnical practice involved in assembling an oceanic weatherspace 
between national jurisdictions and observational networks. Within this new assemblage 
the paper focuses on the developing relationship between meteorologists and pilots, and 
argues that emerging tensions between these actors centred on the negotiation of the 
novel relationships of expertise and authority that had developed within the forecasting 
assemblage supporting trans-Tasman aviation. 

 

Introduction 

 

On the 2nd May 1940 the Tasman Airways Limited (TEAL) flying boat Aotearoa completed a 
roundtrip between Auckland and Sydney. Carrying mail and passengers the Aotearoa’s flight 
inaugurated a regular trans-Tasman air service, and ended over a decade of survey flights, 
political discussion, and commercial negotiation. The Sydney Morning Herald’s (SMH) Aviation 
Correspondent, whose by-line proudly announced the correspondent’s presence on the return 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

 

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flight to Auckland, heaped praise on the flying boat facilities at Auckland’s Mechanics Bay. In 
particular he praised the meteorological organisation supporting the flights observing that, “I 
watched aviation and meteorological experts prepare daily maps of Tasman weather 
developments and another covering a huge surface of the globe bounded by latitudes 25 degrees 
north and 50 degrees south and longitude 100 degrees east and 130 degrees west.”1 The weather 
maps being plotted in the New Zealand Meteorological Service’s (NZMS) Auckland Aviation 
Weather Office (AAWO) were being pieced together from wireless reports of weather 
observations being made by New Zealand, Australian, British and Pan American Airways 
meteorological stations dotted throughout the Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. 
Assembled together these observations, he marvelled, had just enabled the AAWO 
meteorologists to track and calculate the risk of the storm that the Aotearoa had flown through 
on its Auckland flight for over a week prior to the flight. These reports were not only coming 
from terrestrial weather stations. In a subsequent newspaper article the SMH’s correspondant 
made special mention of the work of a dedicated meteorologist who was cris-crossing the 
Tasman Sea on the Union Steam Ship Company (USSCo) Awatea making regular reports on 
upper atmosphere conditions at sea.2 Despite the efforts of this panoply of workers, the SMH 
nonetheless warned that much still needed to be done to perfect the trans-Tasman forecasts that 
would make regular, safe trans-Tasman crossings by the Aotearoa and its sister ship the Awarua 
a reality. 

 

 

 

 

 

                                       
1 Aviation Correspondent, ‘Cooperation at Auckland’, (4 May 1940), Sydney Morning Herald: 16. 
2 Aviation Correspondent, ‘Flight over Gale’, (7 May 1940), Sydney Morning Herald: 9. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

 

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Fig. 1. Aotearoa Survey Flight Across New Zealand, 1938. 

Upper left: Coffee while travelling at 160 miles an hour and thousands of feet above sea-level-Mr. B. A. 
Blythe takes refreshments while at the controls. Upper right: Group-Captain T. M. Wilkes, Mr. A. 
Hardcastle, Mr. E. H. R. Green and Mr. L. Mangham view the landscape. Lower: Captain J. W. Burgess 
(left) and Mr. C. F. Elder (right), first officer, at the controls, with Mr. Blythe. Source: Sir George Grey 
Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, AWNS-19380106-42-2 

 

The inauguration of a regular, commercial aviation route across the Tasman Sea was one 
of a series of changes that profoundly changed New Zealand’s and Australia’s geographies of 
connection with themselves and the rest of the world. Aviation in particular was celebrated as the 
technology par excellence in drawing both countries closer to the rest of the world.3 Alongside 
technologies such as the stream ship, the telegraph and refrigeration, the advent of trans-Oceanic 
aviation after World War One chipped away at the absolute tyranny of distance that defined the 
Australasian world’s political, cultural and economic relationships to the rest of the globe. The 

                                       
3 Ross Ewing and Ross MacPherson, The History of New Zealand Aviation, (Heinemann, 1986); Maurice McGreal, 
A History of Civil Aviation in New Zealand (David Bateman, 2003). For a wider cultural history of aviation see: 
Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908-1918, (Yale University Press, 
1995); Robert Wohl, The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920-1950, (Yale University 
Press, 2005). 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

 

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effect of these changing geographies was profound as the transformative energies of colonial 
societies were framed, and amplified, by the development of intricate links to global networks of 
intellectual and material commerce.4 The new networks that transformed these geographies were 
intimately technopolitical, blending together technological expertise with a keen sensitivity for 
the geopolitical and geoeconomic power of global connections.5  

This paper takes the close entanglement that developed between aviation and 
meteorology in this context and focuses on the emerging relationship between two actors: pilots 
and meteorologists. Our tendency when thinking about the impact of new globalising 
technologies has been to focus on their impacts on wider societies and to pass over the work of 
the building and maintenance of the infrastructures whose ubiquity, accessibility, reliability and 
transparency make globalising connections possible.6 However, as Edwards et al argue the work 
of making infrastructures involves the simultaneous orchestration of technical systems, 
organisational practices and social norms; a point extended by Starosielski who argues that the 
fashioning of infrastructural networks leads to the concomitant development of new professional 
relationships amongst those making emergent networks function.7 In this context the complexity 
of meteorology’s emergent professional cultures and the tensions involved in the stabilisation of 
the discipline’s intersecting ontological and epistemological claims to expertise and credibility 
have been widely documented.8 However, what has been largely missing from debates about the 
development of meteorology as a globalised, ‘infrastructural science’ has been the development 
of situated understandings of how meteorologists engaged with other professional groups, such 
as pilots, with their own emergent and separate claims to expertise and authority, in order to act 
in the world. 9 In one of the few studies addressing the specific relationship between 
meteorologists and pilots, Turner argues that this relationship was very important to the 
establishment of meteorology as a crucial support for aviation. This paper draws attention to the 
negotiation of forecasting authority between meteorologists and pilots as an important, but 
largely ignored, body of organisational innovation and practice in enabling the development of 

                                       
4 Philippa Mein Smith, Peter Hempenstall and Shaun Goldfinch (eds.), Remaking the Tasman World. (Canterbury 
University Press, 2008); Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking (eds), Making a New Land: Environmental Histories of 
New Zealand, New Edition, (Oxford University Press, 2013). 
5 Robert Boyce, ‘Imperial dreams and national realities: Britain, Canada and the struggle for a Pacific Telegraph 
Cable, 1879-1902’, The English Historical Review, 115 (2000): 39-70; David Butler, ‘Technogeopolitics and the 
struggle for control of world air routes, 1910-1928’, Political Geography, 20 (2001): 635-658; Peter Hugill, Global 
Communications since 1844: Geopolitics and Technology, (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Alasdair 
Pinkerton and Klaus Dodds, ‘Radio geopolitics: broadcasting, listening and the struggle for acoustic spaces’, 
Progress in Human Geography, 33 (2009): 10-27; Gordon Pirie, Air Empire: British Imperial Aviation, 1919-39, 
Manchester University Press (2009). 
6 Paul Edwards, Steven Jackson, Geoffrey Bowker and Cory Knobel, Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, 
Tensions, and Design: 'Report of a Workshop on 'History & Theory of Infrastructure: Lessons for New Scientific 
Cyberinfrastructures', (University of Michigan, 2007). 
7 Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network, (Duke University Press, 2015). 
8 Matthew Henry, 'Inspired divination': mapping the boundaries of meteorological credibility in New Zealand, 1920-
1939’, Journal of Historical Geography, 50 (2015): 66-75. 
9 See: Roger Turner, Weathering Heights: The Emergence of Aeronautical Meteorology as an Infrastructural 
Science, (PhD Thesis), (University of Pennsylvania, 2010). 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

 

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regular trans-Tasman flights between Auckland in New Zealand and Sydney in Australia. In 
looking at the development of this specific relationship in this context of this route making the 
paper both extends our understanding of the multiple strands of situated technical, organisational 
and social work required to make meteorology an embedded infrastructural science, and of the 
ways in which its development as infrastructural science required meteorological knowledge and 
practices to move beyond meteorology and meteorologists. 

 

Purifying the Weather 

 

Meteorologists’ desires to better understand and predict atmospheric processes have driven 
meteorology to fashion increasingly more extensive and uniform observational networks.10 The 
result has been, as Edwards shows us, the making of the ‘vast machine’ that characterises 
contemporary, global meteorology, and which comprises a complex, evolving assemblage of 
observers, instruments, models, data flows, and centres of calculation. Neither creating, or 
maintaining this assemblage has been an easy task, requiring as it does both the ongoing 
inscription of the atmosphere, the continual enrolment of those actors that constitute 
meteorological systems, and the connection of those systems together into infrastructural 
networks.11 While the ‘vast machine’ has become extensive, as with assemblages of such scale 
and complexity, it is fragile insofar as its ability to render weather legible relies upon intricate 
coordination across time, space, instruments, observational practices, and weather cultures. 
Edwards talks persuasively of the friction that accompanies the inscription and circulation of 
meteorological data, and of the ways in which this continually disrupts the smooth functioning of 
meteorological networks. However, friction is more than a technical problem, insofar as it 
involves both organisational and social dimensions. In this vein, Hulme has pointed out that 
meteorology’s global assemblages are constituted in, and through, a multiplicity of weather 
cultures which exist at multiple scales, situated in different organisations and in different 
places.12 Some of these cultures, insofar as they advocate alternative understandings of weather 
and how it can be forecasted, have been engaged with by meteorologists in order to dissolve 
them. Traditions of lay forecasting, for example, have long been a target of meteorologists 
seeking to bolster the unstable credibility of meteorology.13 In other situations the different 
cultures are within meteorology itself which, despite its standardising dynamic, is always 
confronted by the particularities of local circumstances, and the tension of transforming local 
                                       
10 Paul Edwards, ‘Meteorology as infrastructural globalism’, Osiris, 21 (2006): 229-250. 
11 Paul Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming, (The MIT 
Press, 2010). 
12 Mike Hulme, ‘Geographical work at the boundaries of climate change’, Transactions, Institute of British 
Geographers, NS 33 (2008): 5-11; Benjamin Orlove and Sarah Strauss, Weather, Climate, Culture, (Berg, 2003); 
Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin, (eds.), A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia, 
(National Museum of Australia Press, 2005). 
13 Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology, (University of Chicago 
Press, 2005); Henry, ‘Inspired divination’. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

 

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weather into global data and vice versa.14 Such circumstances are shaped by unique 
combinations of weather, instrumental assemblages, and the variable priorities of technopolitical 
actors, and almost inevitably lead to the evolution of situated meteorological cultures within and 
between different agencies and the users they connect with. Consequently, while the friction of 
data is in part related to its particular material and informational characteristics, it can also be 
seen as a result of the relational, professional practices required to create, circulate and use 
atmospheric knowledges between different user groups.15  

As with many field-based disciplines the relationships within which meteorology has 
established its onto-epistemological project have been characterised by the uneasy dynamic of 
what Latour describes as purification.16 Taking form in processes such as professionalization, 
instrumentation, automation and so on, this has involved sustained work to redraw the 
epistemological boundaries around meteorology that has necessitated the exclusion of a wide 
range of weather and climate knowledges, and associated interpretative communities.17 In turn 
this epistemological work has contributed to the ontological project of creating meteorology as a 
properly scientific discipline defined by its focus on a stable object of inquiry. Yet, meteorology 
has never been able to operate as a hermetically insulated discipline because of the need to use 
increasingly dispersed observational networks to collect the weather data that is the lifeblood of 
meteorology, and the consequent requirement to enrol a myriad of ostensibly scientific actors to 
voluntarily or otherwise to perform those networks.18 Meteorology throughout the nineteenth 
century and into the twentieth century relied upon amateurs to produce much of its basic data, 
and each of these actors had their own motivations, capacities and relationships that did not 
necessarily align with those of meteorology’s own onto-epistemological atmospheric projects.19 
As a consequence, meteorology’s always-incomplete purification involved intense work focusing 
on orchestrating diverse actors around aspirations to create an infrastructural science that could 
produce increasingly fine-grained, globalised weather understandings, and which would position 
meteorologists as the ‘obligatory points of passage’ for other users seeking information about the 
weather.20  

                                       
14 Simon Naylor, ‘Nationalizing provincial weather: meteorology in nineteenth-century Cornwall’, British Journal 
for the History of Science, 39 (2006): 407-432; Simon Naylor, Regionalizing Science: Placing Knowledge in 
Victorian England, (Pickering and Chatto, 2010). 
15Gary Fine, Authors of the Storm: Meteorologists and the Culture of Prediction, (University of Chicago Press, 
2009). 
16 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, (Harvard University Press, 1993). For a discussion of the inevitable 
impurity of science as practiced see: Simon Shapin, Never Pure, (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 
17 For a wider discussion on this theme in science see: Thomas Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility 
on the Line, (The University of Chicago Press, 1999). 
18 Jeremy Vetter, ‘Lay observers, telegraph lines, and Kansas weather: the field network as a mode of knowledge 
production’, Science in Context, 24 (2011): 259-280. 
19 Georgina Endfield and Carol Morris, ‘Exploring the role of the amateur in the production and circulation of 
meteorological knowledge’, Climatic Change, 113 (2012): 69-89.  
20 This phrase comes from Michael Callon, ‘Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the 
scallops and the fisherman of St Brieuc Bay’, in John Law (ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of 
Knowledge? (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984): 196-233. 



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One specific target of this work was on reconstituting informational networks to improve 
their speed, standardisation, and conceptual reach in order that meteorology could be established 
as an essential infrastructure support for aviation. In the United States, for example, Turner 
points out that meteorologists prior to Second World War began to produce atmospheric models 
and observational assemblages that reflected the upper atmosphere needs of aviation rather than 
other users such as agriculturalists.21 This was a pattern that was also reflected in meteorological 
services developing in places such as New Zealand where despite repeated calls for services such 
as frost warnings and seasonal forecasting from farmers, the NZMS increasingly focused on 
developing observational and forecasting networks concerned with the needs of the developing 
aviation industry.22 The result can be seen as mutually constitutive, insofar as while meteorology 
enabled aviation the obverse was also true, and that moreover meteorology increasingly came to 
conceptualise the atmosphere as an ensemble of processes in ways framed by the concerns of 
aviation. 

The twentieth century was the century of experts in which the command of knowledge 
was central to the development of the modern nation-state, globalised commerce, and the 
networks that made these novel relationships possible.23 Meteorology’s internal processes of 
purification reflected the rise of scientific expertise as a particular source of authority, and 
involved a range of work to dissolve other forms of authority. However, concomitant with this 
project was the intensification of meteorology’s relationships with other expert cultures that were 
also simultaneously seeking to build new social and material worlds.24 Meteorology’s 
entanglement with aviation is a paradigmatic example of these intensifying relationships, 
although one only lightly sketched in the broad context of the trans-Tasman histories of 
meteorology and aviation.25 What distinguishes these intensifying entanglements from 
meteorology’s internal projects to purify itself was the requirement for the negotiation of much 
more symmetrical relationships with other actors who had their own distinct logics, projects and 
claims to technoscientific authority. Here, then expertise in specific weather knowledges such as 

                                       
21 Turner, Weathering Heights. 
22 Henry, ‘Inspired divination’. 
23 Mitchel Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, (Sage Publications, 1999); Rebecca Lave, 
‘The future of environmental expertise’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 105 (2015): 244-252; 
Charles Maier, ‘Consigning the twentieth century to history. Alternative narratives for the modern era’, American 
History Review, 105 (2000): 807-831; Tim Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, 
(University of California Press, 2002). 
24 James Kneale and Samuel Randalls, ‘Invisible atmospheric knowledges in British insurance companies, 1830-
1914’, History of Meteorology, 6 (2014): 35-52; Ruth Morgan, ‘Farming on the fringe: agriculture and climate 
variability in the Western Australian wheat belt, 1890s to 1980s’, in James Beattie, Emily O’Gorman and Matthew 
Henry (eds.), Climate, Science, and Colonization: Histories from Australia and New Zealand, (Palgrave Macmillan, 
2014): 159-176; Meg Parsons, ‘Destabilizing narratives of the “Triumph of the White Man over the Tropics”: 
scientific knowledge and the management of race in Queensland 1900–1940’, in James Beattie, Emily O’Gorman 
and Matthew Henry (eds.), Climate, Science, and Colonization: Histories from Australia and New Zealand, 
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) pp. 213-232; Mark Whitehead, State, Science and the Skies: Governmentalities of the 
British Atmosphere, (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).  
25 Matthew Henry, ‘Trans-Tasman meteorology and the production of a Tasman airspace, 1920-1940’, Environment 
and Nature in New Zealand, 4 (2009): 14-36.  



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those related to the needs of aviation, and how these knowledges should be used to shape action, 
should be seen as the outcome of negotiated, contingent relationships between different domains 
of expertise rather than being the intrinsic feature of any one body of expertise. The development 
of relational, expert weather cultures is the product of complex technical, organisational and 
social process, and one whose exploration contains the potential to provide new insights into the 
development of meteorology as an infrastructural science and how it contributed to the world-
building work of network makers.26 Framing meteorology and its relationships in these terms 
raises questions about how these relationships are negotiated and practiced, what forms of novel 
assemblages arise out of them, and what are the implications for understanding how weather 
knowledges are put to work in the making of social and material worlds. It is to exploring these 
questions, in the context of the development of regular flights across the Tasman Sea between 
New Zealand and Australia, that the remainder of the paper turns. 

 

Fashioning Trans-Tasman Weatherscapes 

 

The weather has been a concern for potential aviators for as long as they have contemplated 
taking to the skies. The emergence and rapid development of powered flight following the 
Wright brothers’successful demonstration at Kitty Hawk in 1903 quickly led to requests for 
meteorological information to help prospective flights in the United States and elsewhere.27 If 
aviators quickly realised the importance of meteorological forecasts, then meteorologists across 
the world also realised the opportunities that would accrue from reconstituting their discipline as 
an essential support to aviation. In New Zealand following the end of World War One (WW1) 
the Government Meteorologist, Reverent Daniel C Bates quickly grasped the intimate link 
between aviation, security and meteorology, arguing that, “though I am not very sanguine about 
the immediate prospects of commercial or civil aviation, yet I firmly believe that something will 
have to be done, and that it is necessary to encourage it and have it in the background as a 
support to the defence of this Dominion.”28 In this context, Bates concluded that, “For the 
development of aviation the prime necessity is the extension of the meteorological service.”29 
However, in a refrain echoed by his successors, he feared that such extension would be beyond 
the capacity of a service that was understaffed and under equipped, and in this context he argued 

                                       
26 Kneale and Randalls, ‘Invisible atmospheric knowledges’. 
27 Kristine Harper, ‘Meteorology's struggle for professional recognition in the USA’, Annals of Science, 63 (2006): 
179-199; John de Lisle, Sails to Satellites: A History of Meteorology in New Zealand, (New Zealand Meteorological 
Service, 1986). 
28 Daniel Bates, ‘International Meteorological Conference’, (20 January 1920), Archives New Zealand / Te Rua 
Mahara o te Kāwanatanga, MET 1 8/8 Pt1, p.5. 
29 Daniel Bates, ‘International Meteorological Conference’. 



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that it would be dangerous to develop air services without attendant improvements in 
meteorological services.30  

Bates predicted that extending meteorology’s ability to support aviation would require 
the expensive reorganisation of observational, reporting and forecasting networks as well as the 
development of specialist instruments and skills to inscribe and interpret aviation-centric 
weatherscapes.31 In New Zealand, the post-World War One work of assembling meteorological 
networks to support the nascent aviation industry crystallised in the provision of forecasts by Dr 
Edward Kidson, Bates’ successor as director of the NZMS, for the successful flight of Charles 
Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm’s Southern Cross across the Tasman Sea in September 1928.32 
This network required significant, novel work to fashion a new understanding of atmospheric 
processes in the Tasman Sea, and equally the orchestration of new socio-political relationships 
between New Zealand and Australian meteorologists. The result of this work was that knowing 
‘the weather’ emerged as essential to securing national and imperial interests in the production of 
a successful, pioneering trans-Tasman flight.33 The inherent uncertainties involved in the 
intersection of weather forecasting and trans-oceanic flights prompted Kidson and others to 
reflect on their own particular responsibilities in relation to how their advice could be used by 
pilots. A previous failed attempt to cross the Tasman, leading to the deaths of the aviators 
George Hood and Robert Moncreiff in early 1928, had led to the suggestion of an inquiry into 
trans-Tasman flights, and their possible suspension. Here Kidson, who had also supplied 
forecasts to Hood and Moncrieff, advised his colleagues in Australia’s Commonwealth Bureau 
of Meteorology (CBM) that they should be prepared to answer questions, but that he felt, ‘The 
aviators knowingly took a sporting risk and luck was against them.’34 However, he also felt that 
progress was needed to made in supplying better forecasts because, ‘too great a responsibility is 
liable to be thrown upon the Meteorologists.’35  

The meteorological network fashioned to support the flight of the Southern Cross was an 
ad hoc assemblage that only enabled a very limited set of forecasts to be produced and 
disseminated for a single return flight.36 While the Southern Cross flights demonstrated the 
potential for regular trans-Tasman air flights it also showed that a significant amount of 

                                       
30 Daniel Bates, ‘Letter to Secretary, Marine Department’, (13 February 1920), Archives New Zealand / Te Rua 
Mahara o te Kāwanatanga, MET 1 8/8 Pt1. 
31 de Lisle, Sails to Satellites. John Dubois, Robert Multhauf and Charles Ziegler, The Invention and Development of 
the Radiosonde, (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002); Chihyung Jeon, ‘Flying weather men and robot observers: 
instruments, inscriptions, and identities in US upper-­‐air observation, 1920–1940’, History and Technology, 26 
(2010): 119-145.  
32 Edward Kidson, ‘Meteorological conditions during the first flight across the Tasman Sea’, Quarterly Journal of 
the Royal Meteorological Society, 55 (1929): 53-54. 
33 Henry, 'Trans-Tasman meteorology'. 
34 Edward Kidson, ‘Letter to Mares, Division Meteorologist, Commonwealth Meteorological Bureau, Sydney’, (19 
January 1928), Archives New Zealand / Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga, ABLO 8 9/5/1. 
35 Edward Kidson, ‘Letter to Mares, Division Meteorologist, Commonwealth Meteorological Bureau, Sydney’, (30 
January 1928), Archives New Zealand / Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga, ABLO 8 9/5/1. 
36 See Edwards et al, Understanding Infrastructure, for a useful discussion of the difference between such ad hoc 
assemblages and infrastructure. 



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connection work between meteorologists in New Zealand and Australia would be required in 
order to consistently produce reliable, and timely, weather forecasts over the Tasman Sea.37 

Throughout the 1930s the growing geopolitical and geoeconomic significance of aviation 
was becoming increasingly evident in the Pacific. During the mid-1930s Pan American Airway 
(PAA) began negotiating with the New Zealand government about the establishment of a Pacific 
route between San Francisco and Auckland that could be eventually connected to the Imperial 
Airways (IA) route linking London and Sydney.38 At the heart of these negotiations was a 
growing realisation of the geopolitical significance of meteorology’s forecasting networks. 
Notwithstanding rapid developments in the capabilities of aircraft, without reliable weather 
forecasts the Pacific remained a vast and dangerous place in which to fly. Consequently, control 
over forecasting networks offered in a degree of control over the air routes themselves, and the 
United States and United Kingdom (plus New Zealand and Australia) actively engaged in 
meteorological network making as part of their wider geopolitical manoeuvring in the Pacific. 

While the Tasman Sea was dominated by Australia and New Zealand the imminent 
arrival of PAA into New Zealand in the late 1930s meant the possibility of both commercial and 
geopolitical disruption as the United States extended its power into the Pacific. As with PAA’s 
developing route between San Francisco and Auckland the technopolitical issues of 
meteorological forecasting represented a key dimension in the creation of an exclusive, imperial 
air route across the Tasman Sea.  

To this end the interrelated issues of the meteorological information and radio networks 
needed to support regular trans-Tasman flights was the focus of a conference held at 
Melbourne’s Victoria Barracks in mid-December 1938 that brought together civil aviation and 
meteorological representatives from the New Zealand and Australian governments.39 At this 
conference the meteorological representatives from both the NZMS and the CBM proposed a 
scheme based on the arrangements that had already been thrashed out in relation to trans-Atlantic 
flights, and which in turn derived from recommendations developed by the International 
Commission for Aviation Meteorology. Collectively they argued that the core basis for the 
creation of effective trans-Tasman weather forecasting lay in the further development of 
cooperation between the services in New Zealand and Australia. In other words, beginning to 
integrate the meteorological systems that had largely developed independently in each country in 
order to produce a shared network to support an air route across the Tasman. 

                                       
37 Henry, 'Trans-Tasman meteorology'. 
38 Matthew Henry, ‘Australasian airspace: Meteorology and the practical geopolitics of Australasian airspace, 1935-
1940’, in James Beattie, Emily O’Gorman and Matthew Henry (eds.), Climate, Science, and Colonization: Histories 
from Australia and New Zealand, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014): 233-249. 
39 New Zealand Meteorological Service, 'Conference of Representatives of the Commonwealth and New Zealand 
Governments, (12 December, 1939), Archives New Zealand / Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga, (ABLO 8 9/5/3 
1935-1939).  



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The NZMS and CBW both agreed that closer cooperation required further work in 
developing what Egyedi has termed gateways, between their different systems.40 There needed to 
be the constant interchange of the synoptic weather reports that both agencies had been gradually 
extending in geographical scope over the previous decades.41 While it was recognised that these 
synoptic reports were not specially prepared for aviation, it was nonetheless felt that they would 
provide a basis for specialised interpretative work by dedicated aviation meteorologists based in 
offices in Sydney and Auckland. In this scheme, once a report had been prepared it would then 
be sent to the other office for information and review. This procedure represented a novel 
departure for forecasting in New Zealand since previously all forecasts had been prepared 
centrally at the NZMS head office in Wellington, and this proposal offered a redistribution and 
partial decentralisation of interpretative authority, a key element of what Edwards has argued is 
the evolution of discrete systems into infrastructures.42 The rationale for the exchange of analysis 
lay in the desire to produce a uniform forecast across the route, and a recognition of the 
unavoidable, but potentially ambiguous, component of interpretation in the preparation of 
forecasts. On this point New Zealand’s representative, Dr Miles Barnett, maintained that “the 
meteorologist at either end requires to know what the other man thinks about the situation, so 
that there may be uniformity, and you have the advantage then of the concerted opinion of the 
two men.”43 Following agreement on a forecast for the Tasman route it would be given to pilots 
for them to use. Here Barnett argued that the pilot needed to have an identical copy of the map 
prepared by two meteorologists in order to facilitate any changes to the flight that might have to 
be made because of the developing weather situation during a flight. In discussing this 
procedure, however, there was no explicit reference made to the potential interpretative role of 
the pilot in either route planning or responding to changing weather in the air. Rather, it was 
assumed that the forecasters at either end of the route would remain the point of passage for 
understanding and interpreting changing weather conditions over the Tasman. 

The trans-Tasman weatherscape that the meteorologists proposed fashioning was to be 
comprised of three interrelated facets: the creation and circulation of synoptic reports; the 
                                       
40 Tineke Egyedi, ‘Infrastructure flexibility created by standardized gateways: the cases of XML and the ISO 
container’, Knowledge, Technology & Policy, 14 (2001): 41-54. Gateways are points of standardised connection 
through which things such as information can flow. 
41 For accounts of the gradual extension of synoptic reporting in New Zealand and Australia see: John de Lisle, ‘The 
New Zealand Meteorological Service -the beginnings 1861-1927’, in Michael Hoare and Linda Bell (eds.), In 
Search of New Zealand's Scientific Heritage, (Royal Society of New Zealand in conjunction with the Alexander 
Turnbull Library, 1984): 17-23; Kirsty Douglas, 'Under Such Sunny Skies': Understanding Weather in Colonial 
Australia, 1860-1901, (Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology, 2007); Roderick Home and Kevin 
Livingstone, ‘Science and technology in the Story of Australian Federation: The case of meteorology, 1876-1908’, 
Historical Records of Australian Science, 10 (1994): 109-127; Eric Webb (ed.), Windows on Meteorology: 
Australian Perspective, (CSIRO Publishing, 1997). 
42 Edwards et al, Understanding Infrastructure. 
43 Barnett was a physicist working at the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) who had been 
selected by Edward Kidson to develop meteorological services in the Pacific. Part of his meteorological training also 
involved him qualifying as a pilot. He had recently returned from completing his meteorological training in Britain, 
see: McGreal, A History of Civil Aviation in New Zealand.  
 



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fashioning and circulation of forecasts specific to the trans-Tasman flights between the 
forecasting meteorologists; and the circulation of those forecasts between the meteorologists and 
pilots. This proposed system put new relationships into play. In the first instance, it created a 
new geography of forecasting. Previously forecasting by meteorologists in either country had 
largely been confined to forecasts defined by their own national borders, but in developing 
Tasman forecasts the meteorologists were creating new forecasting spaces that did not neatly fit 
into previous, largely national scale reporting, interpretation and dissemination practices. 
Second, what the conference left partially unanswered, but which nonetheless would be a crucial 
question, was the nature of the relationships between the various actors being enrolled in this 
new network. The conference was clear that the logic of uniformity would drive the relationship 
between Australian and New Zealand meteorological practice where it came together in the 
Tasman, but left assumed that it would be the meteorologists who would have overriding 
interpretative authority in respect to the decisions made by pilots about developing weather 
situations. 

 

 
Fig. 2. Mechanics Bay Meteorological Station, c.1950. Source: Sir George Grey Special Collections, 
Auckland Libraries, 1370-35-23. 

 

 Parts of the network proposed in Melbourne existed already. Synoptic reporting had been 
the stock-in-trade for meteorological agencies from the mid-nineteenth century onwards 
following the expansion of national and international telegraph networks.44 Both the NZMS and 

                                       
44 Deborah Coen, ‘The storm lab: Meteorology in the Austrian Alps’, Science in Context, 22 (2009): 463-486; 
Robert Friedman, Appropriating the Weather; Vilhelm Bjerkes and the Construction of a Modern Meteorology, 
(Cornell University Press, 2009); Hugill, Global Communications.  



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191 

the CMB (and their precursor agencies) had expended significant efforts over the decades prior 
to 1938 in establishing and connecting observatories and weather observers into national weather 
forecasting systems.45 However, as Home and Livingstone argue, while the use of the telegraph 
to transmit synoptic observations was simple and effective in theory, in practice it was dogged 
with difficulties that ranged from equipment malfunctions through to an indifference to the 
potential value of meteorological data.46 From the mid-nineteenth century onwards the 
meteorological officials in the Australian and New Zealand colonies had been in regular 
correspondence to try and produce standardised meteorological data that could be circulated 
more easily between them.47 However, despite agreements between meteorologists they were 
reliant upon access to telegraph networks, and while this access was of inestimable value to 
them, telegraph organisations tended to see otherwise. In an era of limited capacity and laborious 
data handling, telegraph companies needed ongoing persuasion to treat meteorological reports 
with priority. In New Zealand, for example, by the late 1927s the Reverent DC Bates, director of 
the NZMS, was still consistently complaining about delays in the transmission of weather cables 
caused by their low priority in the eyes of telegraph operators, and that the, “principle of the 
whole of the morning forecast being subject to the exigencies of the Pacific Company’s business 
is simply unthinkable”.48 In this case the technological possibilities of networked weather 
reporting clashed with the friction of competing political and economic demands on 
overstretched lines. 

Access to telegraph services, even begrudgingly offered ones, slowly knitted New 
Zealand and Australian meteorological systems together. But they did so only on a terrestrial 
basis. One problem in trying to fashion forecasts for the Tasman Sea was the Tasman Sea itself, 
and the difficulties associated with collecting and circulating weather observations from within 
it.49 The synoptic reporting emerging at the cusp the post-WW1 development of aviation in New 
Zealand and Australia relied upon expanding networks of land-based, and ground-based, 
observers knitted together by growing networks of telegraph lines. While these networks 
gradually made weather processes over land legible, what was occurring at sea and in the upper 
atmosphere remained largely unknowable.50 The growing use of wireless telegraphy prior to the 
First World War had prompted discussion amongst meteorologists about the possibilities of 
using it to enable ships to report weather observations as a way of extending synoptic reporting 
into places such as the Tasman. In New Zealand, Bates was an enthusiastic proponent of 

                                       
45 de Lisle, ‘Sails to Satellites’; William Gibbs, Origins of Australian Meteorology, (Bureau of Meteorology, 1988). 
Douglas, ‘Under Such Sunny Skies’. 
46 Home and Livingstone, ‘Science and technology’. 
47 Douglas, 'Under Such Sunny Skies'. 
48 Daniel Bates, ‘Letter to Permanent Secretary, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research’, (22 January 
1927), Archives New Zealand / Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga, ANZ MET 1 8/8/2, p.2.  
49 For a discussion of the difficulties of doing science at sea that mirrors the problems faced in the Tasman see: 
Katharine Anderson and Helel Rozwadowski (eds.), Soundings and Crossings: Doing Science at Sea, 1800-1970, 
(Science History Publications, 2016). 
50 Matthew Henry, ‘Assembling meteorology: balloons, leaking gas, and colonial relations in the making of new 
atmospheres’, Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 47 (2017): 162-168.  



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192 

extended marine reporting, lobbying the government for more resources to improve the quantity 
and quality of such reports. Likewise, in Australia, Bates’ colleague AG Ackroyd at the CBM 
regarded the adequate provision of marine reporting as being very important.51 However, while 
ship based reporting provided a means of peering into the Tasman, its reliability and hence 
usefulness was ambiguous. This was because of the same sets of problems confronting 
meteorologists in gauging the reliability of data from land-based observers including: the 
variable quality and calibration of instruments, and the equally variable quality and diligence of 
observers. It was also not helped by the generally low priority given to the taking and timely 
transmission of meteorological observations by ships’ officers. Despite the enthusiasm of people 
such as Bates and Ackroyd, the compromises of ship based weather reporting meant for others, 
such as Bates’s successor at the NZMS, Kidson, a dedication to developing better land-based 
networks at the expense of ship-based networks. 

Nonetheless part of the scheme to create a trans-Tasman weatherscape involved the more 
systematic attention to collecting meteorological information from ships crossing the Tasman. 
Upon the return of Dr Barnett to New Zealand following the Melbourne conference, the head of 
the New Zealand’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) Dr Ernest Marsden 
announced a plan to equip the USSCo Awatea and Huddard Packer’s Wanganella with 
observation stations. Described by Marsden as ‘floating observatories’ these streamers regularly 
plied the proposed trans-Tasman aviation route and could offer regular, up-to-date reports on 
weather conditions in the Tasman.52 Onboard the Wanganella the Australian meteorological 
authorities posted a balloon observer who would periodically release weather balloons to provide 
wind reports from the upper atmosphere. Mindful of criticism of past efforts at ship-based 
reporting Marsden maintained that the equipment supplied and calibrated by the NZMS, “would 
be far superior to that which had been utilised for Tasman observations in the past” and that on 
the basis of this fact alone, “it was expected that observations would enable a greatly improved 
general observational and forecasting service for the Dominion itself.”53 What this system sought 
to establish in distinction to ad hoc observations being carried out grudgingly by ships’ officers 
was a different set of relationships in which ship-based observations would be much more tightly 
controlled by meteorological authorities, and more closely framed by the epistemological 
expectations of uniformity and accuracy the framed general synoptic reporting. In these 
developments, we can see a further situated illustration of the ongoing purification of 
meteorology as its data generation practices and reporting networks were progressively made to 
revolve around the organisational and epistemological authority of meteorologists rather than 
other actors such as ships’ officers.  

                                       
51 Daniel Bates, ‘Letter to Secretary, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, (2 November 1926), 
Archives New Zealand / Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga, MET 1 8/8/3; Ackroyd, ‘Letter to Commonwealth 
Meteorologist, Commonwealth Weather Bureau, Melbourne, (22 November 1926), Archives New Zealand / Te Rua 
Mahara o te Kāwanatanga, MET 1 8/8/3.  
52 Weather Data, New Zealand Herald, (10 January 1939), p.10. 
53 Miles Barnett, 'Letter to the General Manager, Union Steam Ship Company re: Weather Reports from Ships', (21 
July 1939), Archives New Zealand / Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga, ABLO 8 9/5/3 1935-1939.  



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193 

The extent to which ship-based weather observations had become integral to the general 
system of aviation forecasting can be seen in complaints following the start of the trans-Tasman 
service. The service started in April 1940, but with the outbreak of war in the Pacific in 
December 1941 meteorological communications suddenly became strategically significant. 
Consequently, radio broadcasts became subject to censorship and encoding, and broadcasts from 
ships were curtailed.54 With a proposal to extend the nascent trans-Tasman service to include 
night flights, the Officer-in-Charge of Auckland’s Meteorological Section reported that the lack 
of reports from shipping in the Tasman, “leave the present network short of vital information 
essential if adequate meteorological safeguards are to be maintained.”55 A similar point was 
articulated by Barnett who observed that the absence of ships’ reports left forecasters in 
Auckland seriously handicapped. Helping to plug the gap left by the absence of ships’ reports 
were weather observations radioed to the forecasters in Auckland and Sydney by pilots over the 
Tasman, and he hoped that there would be no effort to reduce this radio traffic because of the 
exigencies of war.56 

The telegraph, and then radio, enabled meteorologists to more than transcend their 
locality and enable action at a distance, it also permitted the weather to be inscribed into new 
forms of visual representation that profoundly changed how the weather could come to be 
known. Kirsty Douglas suggests that the weather is illegible, and that to render it legible, and 
usable, required the fabrication of new forms of visuality characterised by the attenuation of 
complexity in the pursuit of predictable, representatable order.57 Thus, the generalised isobaric 
patterns and meteorological codes that enabled the telegraphic circulation of meteorological 
information relied upon the heroic abstraction of weather phenomena. In this way the weather 
map became a quintessentially modern artefact that both reflected and supported meteorology’s 
ontological status as a modern project and its position as part of the necessary infrastructure of 
the modern world.58 Yet this quintessentially modern project involving the inscription and 
circulation of the weather was constantly being challenged by equipment (unstandardized 
instruments) and circumstances (lax observational procedures at sea) that continued to defeat the 
goals of uniformity. 

Other relationships could also potentially disrupt the project of making the Tasman Sea’s 
weather knowable. As Barnett had observed at the 1938 Melbourne conference a key part of the 
creation of a uniform Tasman forecast was the circulation of analysis as well as the circulation of 
observations and charts. Kidson, Barnett’s predecessor as Director at the NZMS, had since the 

                                       
54 Miles Barnett, 'H-37 Report of the Director of the Meteorological Office for the year ended 31st March 1940', 
Appendix to the Journal of the House of Representatives, 3 (1940): 22-24. 
55 L.N Larson, 'Report by L.N. Larson on Meteorological Conditions over the Tasman Sea as affecting possible 
regular night flying on the route between Auckland and Sydney', (Undated), Archives New Zealand / Te Rua 
Mahara o te Kāwanatanga, ABLO 8 9/5/3 1942-1945.  
56 Miles Barnett, 'Letter to the Acting-Controller of Civil Aviation, (27 March 1942), Archives New Zealand / Te 
Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga, ABLO 8 9/5/3 1942-1945.  
57 Douglas, 'Under Such Sunny Skies'; James Scott, Seeing Like a State, (Yale University Press, 1998). 
58 Edwards, 'Meteorology as infrastructural globalism'. 



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194 

early 1930s been developing forecasting methods for aviation in New Zealand based on the 
Norwegian school of frontal analysis.59 This work had been spurred by the unexpected visit of 
Jorgan Holmboe to New Zealand in 1933 as the meteorologist on the Lincoln Ellsworth 
Antarctic Expedition. However, like observational data the exercise of interpretative expertise 
required constant calibration between meteorological centres, particularly where it started to be 
based on new conceptual models of the atmosphere such as were starting to be used in New 
Zealand. Discussions at the intercolonial conferences in the late nineteenth century had thrown 
up tensions concerning the extent to which the colonial meteorologists felt the need to 
subordinate their situated expertise in relation to forecasting to the standardised protocols of the 
Royal Meteorological Society.60 Uniformity of instrumental calibration and observational 
practices was one thing, but but trying to do the same thing for forecasting was another insofar as 
forecasting was argued to depended upon the situated interpretative ability of experts operating 
in dispersed calculative centres.  

This issue was highlighted by LN Larsen, an Assistant Meteorologist at the NZMS’s 
AAWO based at Mechanic’s Bay, who in mid-1939 asked for permission to accompany the 
Aotearoa on its next trans-Tasman survey flight between Auckland and Sydney.61 The genesis 
for his proposal had come from the Aotearoa’s Captain Jack Burgess who had expressed his 
belief that significant benefits would accrue from having a meteorologist accompany the survey 
flights so as to be able to directly compare the forecast conditions with the actual conditions 
experienced by pilots on the flight.62 Larson also argued that in addition, “it would be of great 
value to us to contact the Australian people and see just what they are doing.”63 Larson flew to 
Sydney with the Aotearoa on its next survey flight, and his report on return affirmed the value of 
the trip. The flights had enabled him to directly compare the forecast weather and the actual 
weather, and for the return journey he had been able to personally see how the CBM 
meteorologists went about analysing and preparing their weather charts and forecasts. Observing 
the work of his Australian colleagues, wrote Larson, “will be of great value in interpreting the 
statements from that Service at a later date and to assist in them in interpreting the situation as 

                                       
59 Edward Kidson and Jorgan Holmboe, Frontal Methods of Weather Analysis Applied to the Australia-New Zealand 
Area: Part 1 Discussion, (Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, 1933); Edward Kidson, ‘The analysis of 
weather charts’, The Australian Geographer, 2 (1935): 3-16. 
60 Home and Livingstone, ‘Science and technology’.  
61 L.N. Larson, 'Letter to Dr Barnett, (19 September 1939)', Archives New Zealand / Te Rua Mahara o te 
Kāwanatanga, ABLO 8 9/5/4 1939. Prior to working at the Mechanics Bay office, Larsen had been in charge of the 
NZMS office at Christchurch’s Wigram Aerodrome with a particular focus on instructing Royal New Zealand Air 
Force pilots and navigators, see: Evening Post, ‘Weather Services’, (23 August 1939): 11. 
62 Captain Jack Burgess was a New Zealander who undergone pilot training in the United Kingdom and had 
subsequently served in the Royal Airforce and with Imperial Airways. A brief biography of Burgess was published 
on his arrival with the Centaurus from Sydney in December 1937, see: ‘Proud Family’, Auckland Star, (27 
December 1937): 9. 
63 L.N. Larson, 'Letter to Dr Barnett', (19 September 1939), Archives New Zealand / Te Rua Mahara o te 
Kāwanatanga, ABLO 8 9/5/4 1939.  



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195 

transmitted by one’s own Service.”64 However, while Larson praised the hospitality of his hosts 
he was critical of some of their methods. He noted for instance that in the CBM’s Sydney Office 
standardised maps were not used for the preparation of synoptic weather charts, and that isobaric 
contours were sometimes plotted in millibars and sometimes in inches. In plotting these charts, 
the Sydney Office used cabled data from New Zealand, but Larson expressed his surprise that no 
formal system had been put in place to receive the NZMS’s broadcasts. At the CBM office in 
Melbourne, Larson discussed arrangements for the trans-Tasman route with the Commonwealth 
Meteorologist William Watt. As with the practice he observed at the Sydney Office, Larson felt 
that improvements could be made in the plotting of synoptic charts. He inspected the system for 
collecting the Bureau’s upper air soundings, reporting that in relation to air mass classification, 
“a local terminology based on broad geographical limits has been adopted for internal use.”65 
More importantly he observed that, “In the analysis again little attempt is made to analyse the 
Tasman Sea and New Zealand area. Copies of the various charts used in the synoptic section 
have been secured and it will be seen that some do not include New Zealand at all.”66  

Larson’s comments are sharpened if they are placed alongside contemporaneous 
reflections by Kidson about the future development of the NZMS.67 Kidson noted the rapid 
expansion of the NZMS and the difficulties associated with training large numbers of new 
officers. One specific problem that was being addressed was the need for uniformity in the 
making and coding of meteorological observations. Here he pointed to the essential art of the 
forecaster depends upon visual uniformity insofar as the “only way in which a meteorologist can 
understand the existing situation and so anticipate future changes is to plot the information on 
charts so that it can be taken in by the eye, and the relation of the different elements grasped…. 
If reports come in different codes, if different elements are reported, or different units used, the 
difficulty in charting is very much increased.”68 In particular, he argued, the need for uniformity 
was especially acute for aviators since by the very nature of their activity they were constantly 
moving from system to system. Consequently, “The methods of plotting reports and drawing 
maps must, therefore, also be uniform. The charts themselves must [be?] on uniform and suitable 
projections and the number of different scales used reduced to a minimum.”69 In order to achieve 
this desired level of uniformity Kidson advocated adhering as closely as possible to the voluntary 
standards established by the International Meteorological Organisation (IMO) because it enabled 

                                       
64 L.N. Larson, 'Survey Flight by Flying-Boat 'Aotearoa' to Australia, 24th. Sept. to 1st Oct. 1939. Report by L.N. 
Larson, Meteorologist, Auckland', (Undated), Archives New Zealand / Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga, ABLO 8 
9/5/4 1939. p.1. 
65 Larson, 'Survey Flight by Flying-Boat 'Aotearoa' to Australia', p.5. 
66 Larson, 'Survey Flight by Flying-Boat 'Aotearoa' to Australia’, p.5. 
67 Edward Kidson, 'H-34 Meteorological Branch: Report of the Director, 1938-39', Appendix to the Journal of the 
House of Representatives, 3 (1938): 96-102. 
68 Edward Kidson, 'H-34 Meteorological Branch’, p.96. 
69 Edward Kidson, 'H-34 Meteorological Branch’, p.96. Given these comments one hesitates to think what Kidson 
would have made of Larson’s report showing the variations in charts and plotting in the Australian meteorological 
offices. 



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196 

the creation of a visual language for the weather that transcended either language or 
organisational differences.70 

 

 
Fig. 3. Preliminary Flight Forecast, Auckland to Sydney, 30 June 1942. Source: Archives New Zealand / 
Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga, ABLO 8 9/5/3 1935-39 

                                       
70 Edward Kidson, 'H-34 Meteorological Branch’, p.96. 



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197 

 

Larson’s visit to Sydney and Melbourne, as well as Kidson’s statements about uniformity 
in forecasting, highlighted the importance of Barnett’s earlier assertion that regular Tasman 
forecasting required more than the circulation of uniform data. It also required the fashioning of 
uniform interpretative spaces. Larson’s observations of the day-to-day plotting practices of his 
CBM colleagues illustrated subtle variations in analysis. Local variations that in themselves were 
not necessarily important when framed within the confines of a nationally organised 
meteorological system, but which could easily cause misunderstandings when locally coded 
analysis was circulated beyond the context of its production and interpretation. Larson’s series of 
observations about the relative lack of use of New Zealand derived data, and the general deficit 
of attention to the analysis of the Tasman reflected the different environmental conditions and 
priorities that confronted each meteorological agency. Thus, in the case of the Australian 
meteorologists the analysis of the situation over New Zealand was of far less importance than air 
movements from the tropics downwards, while conversely New Zealand’s prevailing westerly air 
movements meant that the Australian situation provided an important indication of future 
weather conditions over the Tasman and New Zealand. Thus, the creation of a trans-Tasman 
weatherscape was then not simply a case of connecting together two existing meteorological 
systems. Rather it required degrees of harmonisation between the priorities of two local networks 
that had orientated themselves in different ways towards different weather patterns  

While Larson focused on the work of his Australian colleagues, he also briefly touched 
on the relationship between pilots and meteorologists. Based on his own flights and discussions 
with Captain Burgess and others he observed that, “the Captain of the aircraft feels more 
confidence in the forecaster if it is known that he has had actual flying experience over the route 
in question.”71 Larson’s point about the confidence needed by a pilot in forecasters, and how that 
confidence could be developed, reflected the growing importance of the relationship between 
pilots and meteorologists as flights grew longer and increasingly over water. A feature of the 
discussions that occurred during the 1938 Melbourne conference was the tension between 
meteorologists and aviation representatives on the relative authority of an aircraft’s captain vis-à-
vis a forecaster. The system that was being proposed at the Melbourne conference was 
predicated upon the routing of meteorological information through the meteorological offices in 
either Sydney or Auckland. In turn, these offices would act at centres of calculation for the 
interpretation of weather information and preparation of forecast charts. While pilots would have 
copies of these charts, once in the air further reports and analysis would continue to come 
through the two meteorological offices. A point affirmed by Dr Barnett, who under questioning 
from Squadron Leader CS Wiggins, stated that, “except in special emergencies, the whole thing 
should go through the terminals.”72 However, Wiggins continued to press the point about a 

                                       
71 L.N. Larson, 'Survey Flight by Flying-Boat 'Aotearoa' to Australia', A sentiment that perhaps explains Dr MAF 
Barnett’s pilot training as part of his meteorological training in the United Kingdom. 
72 New Zealand Meteorological Service. ‘Conference of Representatives of the Commonwealth and New Zealand 
Governments’, (12 December 1938), Archives New Zealand / Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga, ABLO 8 9/5/3 



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definite procedure arguing that, “in an emergency he might need to use facilities available from a 
ship and from an observer on that ship. Therefore it would seem advisable that during normal 
conditions that procedure should be practised.”73 Barnett resisted, arguing that such a practice 
would be not be desirable, in part because he could not see a situation where a ship based 
observer could provide more information than what was coming from the forecasters located at 
the terminals. One of the CBM meteorological representatives HM Warren suggested that the 
issue of an aircraft captain contacting ships in the Tasman was an operational issue insofar as, 
“the ships will be putting in their reports to the terminal stations and the terminal stations will be 
using those for the preparation of its messages” and that this would constitute the normal circuit 
of meteorological information.74 However, Warren also suggested that, “If there is any other 
message a ship desires, that would be an ordinary operational matter for the pilot.”75 A 
distinction that Barnett continued to express his doubts about, but to which he reluctantly agreed. 
The result was that aircraft captains would have the authority to seek further weather information 
from sources outside the normal meteorological network if they felt they needed to do so. 

At the heart of this dispute was the emerging relationship of authority and expertise 
between forecasters and pilots. Framed by the authority of action given to sea captains, pilots had 
been accorded very significant, albeit largely tacit, authority over the operation of their aircraft 
and flights. Such authority rested on the assumed expertise of the pilot as the ultimate point of 
operational decision-making in flying an aircraft. Moreover, meteorological instruction was, as 
Turner shows, an increasingly significant part of pilot training by the late 1930s and pilots could 
claim with some justification to have degrees of situated, interpretative expertise when it came to 
weather.76 However, as aviation’s operational assemblages grew in complexity the singular 
authority of the captain also shifted. The meteorological system being put in place in Melbourne 
in 1938 did more than simply place a weather chart and forecast in the hands of the pilot. Rather 
via continual radio contact it placed the forecaster in the cockpit with the pilot as another 
potential centre of expertise and authority. Here then existed the conditions for tension between 
the meteorological expertise of the forecaster and the operational expertise of the pilot, 
particularly where pilot training was largely silent on how that relationship was to be negotiated. 
In New Zealand, for example, meteorological instruction codified in publications such as the 
Royal New Zealand Airforce’s Elementary Meteorology simply framed the relationship in terms 
of the supply of information to pilots, not how that information was to be used, and not what 
other information might also be used for decision-making in relation to weather conditions.77 

                                                                                                                           
1935-1939. p.9. 
73 New Zealand Meteorological Service. ‘Conference of Representatives’, p.9. 
74 New Zealand Meteorological Service. ‘Conference of Representatives’, p.10. 
75 New Zealand Meteorological Service. ‘Conference of Representatives’, p.10. 
76 Turner, Weathering Heights. 
77 Royal New Zealand Airforce, Elementary Meteorology, (Whitcombe & Tombs, 1941). A later discussion of a 
lecture outline for pilot training talked about the point of meteorological instruction as being about providing pilots 
with enough understanding to have an intelligent conversation with a meteorologist about weather reports and 



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Given this context Squadron Leader Wiggins’ pressing on the issue of the ability of pilots 
to seek information beyond the formal meteorological network illustrated a nervousness about 
the potential diminution of expertise, authority and status of pilots caused by the enmeshing of 
pilots and the operation of their aircraft within wider assemblages of command.  

Conversely, Dr Barnett’s continued belief in the sufficiency of the forecasts being 
provided from the terminals reflected the significance attributed to the production of a uniform 
Tasman weatherscape, and the potential disruption to that uniformity of information and analysis 
that might result from the ad hoc addition of weather information and analysis from ships in the 
Tasman Sea. Consequently, in what appears to be a minor debate there lurked quite significant 
questions about the relationship between two bodies of expertise and between the ideals of the 
situational authority of pilots vis-à-vis the search for consistency and uniformity that framed the 
work of the meteorologists. In this respect, the decision to allow pilots to contact ships for 
situational observations outside the normal circulation of meteorological analysis represented a 
continuing recognition of the overall authority of pilots in navigating trans-Tasman airspace in 
relation to the growing aspirations of meteorologists to become the singular point of 
interpretative authority. 

                                                                                                                           
forecasts, see, Officer in Charge (Wigram), ‘Letter to Director, NZMS’, (5 August 1966), Archives New Zealand / 
Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga ABLO 46/6/2. 



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200 

 
Fig. 4. Poster Advertising the New Trans-Tasman Air Route, c.1946. Source: National Library of New 
Zealand, Eph-D-AVIATION-1946-01 

Conclusion 

 

In late 1944 the New Zealand Herald boldly announced in relation to trans-Tasman flying that 
the weather had been mastered (see Figure 4).78 With the combination of improved 
meteorological information and practices, plus four years of experience operating across the 
Tasman, flights were now running to within a few minutes of scheduled times. The emergence of 
regular flights was in no small part dependent upon the creation and ongoing maintenance of a 
trans-Tasman meteorological infrastructure that was producing regular weather reports and 
forecasts. This paper has traced the emergence of this network, its historical antecedents and the 
effort that it took to bring multiple strands of information and analysis into uniform alignment. A 
key dynamic in the fashioning of this new service was the gradual purification of meteorological 
                                       
78 New Zealand Herald, ‘Tasman Flying’, (28 October 1944): 8. 



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201 

networks that saw meteorology’s long and dispersed inscription systems becoming increasingly 
uniform and connected, albeit never completely so. At the centre of these developing networks 
rested the ideal, albeit never fully realised, of the interpretative authority of the meteorologist 
who alone had the expertise to transform the data of atmospheric tumult into usable guides for 
action. Meteorology’s internal dynamics of purification existed in tension with the increasing 
intensity of its relationship as an infrastructural science with other fields of activity such as 
aviation. Such relationships were highly productive, spurring the generation of new theories, 
techniques and instruments in order to make legible the phenomena of novel spaces such as the 
upper atmosphere. However, as the paper has argued, by becoming increasingly entangled with 
aviation, meteorologists also confronted limits to their authority insofar as their developing 
relationships with pilots exposed alternative sources of authority in respect to decision-making 
about the weather. While meteorologists positioned themselves as key interpretative actors in 
confronting aviation’s weather problems, it was a contingent authority that allowed room for the 
continuing exercise of pilots’ situated decision making regarding their use of weather 
information. 

Beyond the specific development of a trans-Tasman aviation route and the negotiation of 
the relationship between meteorologists and pilots on that route, what this paper is arguing is that 
emerging research into meteorology’s history need to be more actively searching for the myriad 
traces of the relationships between meteorologists and the other actors, such as pilots, who have 
been involved in the making, circulation and use of meteorology as an infrastructural science in 
the fashioning of modern worlds. Meteorology’s historiography has been dominated by the effort 
to uncover and understand how meteorology came to be global, and how meteorologists came to 
be the points of passage through which the weather became legible. What has been missed, as 
central objects of attention, are the ways in which the story of meteorology’s purification and 
extension has a corresponding story in the intensification of its relationships to other networks 
and spheres of work. What this paper has shown is that in exploring the story of meteorology’s 
intensifying relationships with other professional groups we can start to build a richer picture of 
how meteorology came to be able to act in the world at a distance through other actors. But in 
doing so we also begin to see how that ability to act has been intimately framed by the 
negotiation of the tension between contrasting sources of expertise and authority enacted by the 
variety of actors involved in the making of situated, relational weatherscapes such as was begun 
to be produced over the Tasman Sea in the late 1930s. 

 

Acknowledgements 

I would like to thank the editors for their invitation to contribute to this special issue. I would 
also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who commented on the initial manuscript. Their 
insightful comments have been extremely useful in sharpening the focus of the final paper, and 
in avoiding some simple historiographical omissions. As usual, however, any remaining faults 
with the paper are the responsibility of the author. 


