Feature Fellow
Meteorologist John Zillman has shaped science and innovation policy in Australia and internationally, and contributed significantly to raising global awareness of climate change. He became a Fellow of the Academy in 2006.
What is the most exciting thing you’ve done in science?
For most excitement, I would have to call it a three-way dead heat between: a successful forecast of snow in Queensland, in July 1965, in places where snow had never previously been recorded; flying into Tropical Cyclone Rosa at 600 feet in a US Stormfury aircraft over the Gulf of Carpentaria in February 1979; and being part of the long and difficult intergovernmental negotiations and the eventual prolonged standing ovation which re-established universal commitment to free and unrestricted international exchange of essential meteorological data in Geneva in May 1995.
Where will your science be in 50 years?
Long range forecasting is dangerous, especially when you are a meteorologist, but it is less intimidating when you only risk being proved wrong long after you are gone. I am confident that weather and climate forecasting will be substantially more detailed and much more reliable in 50 years than it is now but I am also certain that it will not be perfect and that forecast improvement will remain a formidable scientific and technological challenge for the mid-21st Century.
Conservatively, I believe weather forecasts for 10 days ahead, 50 years from now, will be as reliable as today's forecasts are for tomorrow; and predictions about next year being wetter or drier than this year will be right nine times out of 10.
Why did you study meteorology?
I studied meteorology because a cadetship with the Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology was my way of paying my way through University when bad seasons would have made it very hard for my dairy farmer parents to give me the tertiary education they desperately wanted me to have. And I chose a cadetship with the Bureau ahead of a Queensland Government cadetship in electrical engineering by the toss of a coin. I think I would have made a reasonable engineer but meteorology turned out to be a fascinating life-long career and the 'Heads it’s the Bureau' outcome of my coin-tossing gamble was a piece of pure luck for which I will forever be grateful.
Who inspires you and why?
When I first joined the Bureau, I was privileged to be taken under the wing of some truly inspiring ex-World War II forecasters who had begun to unravel the mysteries of weather in the Australian tropics. But the greatest sustained inspiration in my professional career has come from my Australian and international colleagues who encouraged and supported my involvement in international meteorological cooperation. On my first visit to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva in the early 1970s, I was greatly inspired by the depth of personal friendship between former World War II opponents and Cold War adversaries and their shared belief in the power of international cooperation to do good in the world. It enabled me to see almost everything we did in the Bureau of Meteorology as an important contribution to both Australia and the world.
What are your memories of science at high school?
I enjoyed physics and mathematics in my four years as a boarder at Nudgee College, on the northern outskirts of Brisbane. I liked mathematics because of its rigour and the determined, if somewhat intimidating, commitment to excellence of my maths teacher in my senior years. Physics was wonderful because it explained so much of the world around me and because my physics master seemed so authoritative, confident, patient and wise. I never quite came to grips with chemistry, perhaps because of less inspiring teaching and the fright I got from a minor explosion in our first laboratory class. Although I also enjoyed logic and the languages at school, I concluded quite early in the piece that science was more challenging and more worthwhile. And it was, after all, the dawn of the space age. Coming from a little one-teacher primary school in the bush, it was hard to resist the excitement and the sense of wonder of high school science in the 1950s.
