Met Ships

[John Arton]

On the north Atlantic run to Montreal on the canmar ambassador, we had a weather observation container fitted, manned by metrology technical guys from the Finnish met service. At regular intervals they would release weather balloons that would go all the way up into the upper atmosphere constantly sending back to the container, temperature, pressure etc. This info would then be downloaded onto a computer and sent to a body collating all the information. The three sister ships, ex Dart container line, that were run by Canadian Pacific, OOCL and CMB all had these containers fitted manned and operated by metrologist from Finland, U.K and Belgium. The whole project was under the guise of something called North Atlantic metrologic study and was a year long project to map the weather systems after the demise of the permanent weather vessels. This was in the mid 80's.
Rgds
J.A.

[happy daze john in oz]

Wonderful tings those weather balloons, do some amazing work.

All the information being converted by the weather men into the daily forecast.
Sunday forecast for Monday, 21 degrees with the occasional shower.
Actual weather Monday, cold at about 17 degrees and constant rain.

Obviously the conversion rate is not equal to the eventual outcome.