6:45 - Get up. Don cycling gear, eat, brush teeth, check the rain gauge (no rain as usual) and the anemometer (thing that measures the wind) - cripes, I’m a weather weeny from hour one! Wind’s from the south, so head to work up the bike path along the glorious (though somewhat foggy) Port Phillip bay. I’m soon at the Bureau of Meteorology in the city. Shower. Bolt up to the office. The day starts a-proper.

9:05 - I’ve still got my bag over my shoulder, but can’t help chatting to Dave Jones – the head of climate analysis for Australia, my boss and weekend mountain bike buddy. “How are those graphs looking for our Northern Australia paper?” We’re putting together a paper on the incredibly hot (and dry) start to 2005. When you take away the impacts of the low rain (and hence little cloud), it’s been a far hotter start to the year than you would expect. In fact - for northern Australia - easily the hottest wet season on record.

9:35 – Checked that a PPQ (Possible Parliamentary Question - if you don’t have a TLA [1] in this business, you’re a nobody) I’d prepared the day before had been received and was ok. We have to brief the federal minister and his parliamentary secretary on possible questions that may get asked in parliament. We also have to give them the answers – that’s our job, after all. In this case, we informed them of the hot and dry start to the year, and the chances of an El Niño, which are currently somewhat higher than normal.

9:40 – Get a phone call from NSW office about El Niño, and what we are thinking…

9:45– Received the updates from the IRI (International Research Institute for climate prediction) in New York, with their thinking of the El Niño situation. They’ve eased off with their forecast, which is a bit different to ours… science is all about discussion and consideration of other all angles. I’ll send an email to Tony from IRI to get his finer points.

10:00 – Check my bay winds page! I windsurf all too much (which is barely enough) and hence my passion for windsurfing and weather collide beautifully in a web page I run from my alma mater, Melbourne Uni, showing the winds on Port Philip bay. Still check it every day. Check the emails from users too. Not much feedback today. Lotsa spam though. I hate spam.

10:05 – Check out a web site sent to me that lists the various greenhouse denialists groups, and where they get their money. It’s somewhat depressing.

10:10 – Ok, time for some real work. Each month we put together a document called the South Pacific Seasonal Outlook Reference Material (SPSORM) that gets sent to out friends in the South Pacific, outlining our current thinking about El Niño and climate in general, and the impacts for the region.  We get some good feedback on this, as many of the meteorology services in the South Pacific are very small, and hence unable to support a large climate science program as we are so lucky to have in Australia.

10:45 – Lyn Bettio, like me a Melb Uni graduate, and more recently the person contracted to help me do my work here in the National Climate Centre (NCC), has an interview for a permanent job with us. Cross fingers – she’s a good find.

11:40 – Ring up my old PhD supervisor, Prof Ian Simmonds, to warn him that I’ve just dobbed him in to do an interview on climate change impacts in the Antarctic with the ABC’s “World Today” radio program. “Don’t worry – you’ll keep Watkins!” he yells as he learns it was me who fingered him to do it… he he he…

12:00 – Speak to Ann in our Brisbane office about a tricky interview she might have. A leaked report about water has revealed that the water may run out in Brissy over the next few years if they don’t get reasonable rainfall. The media is asking Ann about long term rainfall outlooks.

12:20 - Lunch!! Yum yum! Gather the lunch crew and wander over the bridge to Collins Street and find a nice spot to eat. Always healthy to get out of your building and see the sun. (Note – don’t actually look at the sun.)

 

13:30 - Back in the office and laughing at an email sent from a climate change denialist (this time a computer technician from Croydon) to a professional climatologist colleague at Monash Uni. Any email that starts with the somewhat classic line “I have to ask - are you a total ignoramus who refuses to examine the facts or just a tosser ?” has to be worth a read! His “facts” have me calling “BINGO” on the Global Warming Sceptic Bingo Game in about half a page!

13:40 – Back into the SPSORM. Write, think, write, think… it’s a tricky El Niño situation right now, and its vitally important we convey the complexity in a way others will understand.

15:45 – Send out the SPSORM to our South Pacific friends – there’s several countries and around 60 people who receive it. Phew… it’s a big job and normally takes 2 days once a month. Lyn has helped me out heaps with this one.

15:55 – Start on the answers to a bunch of questions from WMO –World Meteorological Organization - the United Nations weather and climate people. I’ve been co-ordinating a big climate summary and analysis for the globe in 2003. The editors and lay-out people in Geneva, WMO’s home base, need some more text and images for a section. Argh! Chase down some images and write some captions.

16:45 – Answered some questions arising from the SPSORM sent out earlier. A person from our research centre wants to know how the globe could have just had its 3^rd warmest ocean temperatures on record for March, yet the maps of ocean temperatures look so bland and normal (let him know it’s just that the maps ARE bland… if we look at a different contour range, it does indeed look consistently warm.)

17:35 – sent answers to questions and some suggested images to WMO.

17:45 – listened on the net to Prof Simmo’s interview on the ABC. Not bad for an old guy! J

17:50– clean up a weeks worth of emails, jot down some reminders in the diary for next week, then check the weekend weather – as any good windsurf junkie would do on Friday night!

18:05 - head for the bike cage and an evening cycle home along the bay again.

 

That’s my day.

Andrew Watkins was always interested in how things worked when he was in high school, particularly how things worked in nature. He was wrapped over the knuckles several times in Chinese language lessons by a somewhat zealous teacher for preferring to gaze out at the clouds than draw characters. This Pavlovian training stalled his interest momentarily, so at Melbourne University he studied physics. However when this became too esoteric, and he was trapped in a basement for pracs unable to see clouds, he dropped quantum mechanics (“NOBODY drops quantum mechanics Watkins!” cried the Prof) and wandered over the bridge to Earth Sciences. There a Professor encouraged him to gaze at the clouds during lectures, and marked him well for doing so. It was meant to be.