Person

Clarke, Reginald Henry (1914 - 1990)

Born
1 December 1914
Melrose, South Australia, Australia
Died
13 June 1990
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Occupation
Meteorologist

Summary

Reginald Clarke joined the Bureau of Meteorology in 1940 as a recruit to the RAAF Meteorological Service from the South Australian Education Department. He remained with the Bureau after the war and spent some time in charge of the Canberra office, during which time he developed a keen interest in frontal and boundary layer phenomena, before being promoted to the analysis and weather development section in Melbourne. In 1957 Clarke joined the CSIRO Division of Meteorological Physics at Aspendale and was the first head of the Australian Numerical Meteorology Research Centre 1974-1978. He continued working after retirement, in 1978, with the University of Melbourne on the 'Morning Glory' phenomenon of the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. Clarke's research interests focused on sea breezes and cold fronts, and the use of numerical modelling in understanding these. He was noted for his meticulously planned and extensive field observations: several of these studies attracted international attention. Since 1987 the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society has hosted the annual R. H. Clarke Lecture.

Skip to

Details

Chronology

1939 - 1940
Career position - Teacher, Quorn High School, South Australia
1940 - 1946
Career event - Served with the Meteorology Branch, Royal Australian Air Force
1946 - 1949
Career position - Officer-in-Charge, Meteorological Office, Canberra Airport
1949 - 1957
Career position - Meteorologist, Air Mass and Frontal Analysis Section, Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne
1957 - 1971
Career position - Research Scientist, CSIRO Division of Meteorological Physics
1971 - 1974
Career position - Research Scientist, CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Physics
1974 - 1978
Career position - Officer-in-Charge, Australian Numerical Meteorology Research Centre (ANMRC)
1978
Life event - Retired
1979 - 1980
Career position - Chairman, Royal Meteorological Society Australian Branch
1983
Education - Doctor of Science (DSc), University of Melbourne
1985
Award - Priestley Medal, Royal Meteorological Society Australian Branch
1988 - 1990
Award - Honorary Member, Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society

Published resources

Journal Articles

  • Anon, 'Reginald Harry Clarke BA, MSc, DSC 1914 - 1990', Australian meteorological magazine, 38 (1990), 223-5. Details
  • Anon, 'Reg Clarke: his life and work', Australian meteorological magazine, 41 (1992), 3-5. Details

Resources

See also

Helen Morgan and Helen Cohn

Created: 10 May 2001, Last modified: 7 March 2025

EOAS ID: biogs/P003236b.htm

This Edition: 2026 February - 1926 Centenaries
Kooyang - Gariwerd calendar - Late summer: late January to late March - season of eels
Reference: https://www.bom.gov.au/resources/indigenous-weather-knowledge/indigenous-seasonal-calendars/gariwerd-calendar#bom-anchor-list__item-kooyang-season-of-eels

Publisher: Swinburne University of Technology.

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P003236b.htm

For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260