Minutes of the 28th Annual General Meeting of the
Meteorological Society of New Zealand (Inc.)
held on Tuesday, November 28th, 2007 at NIWA, Greta Point, Wellington
The meeting opened at 4:00 PM

The meeting was chaired by Kim Dirks (President) and the minutes have been
written by
Simon Kjellberg (Secretary).

1. Attendance
Kim Dirks Simon Kjellberg Bob McDavitt Jim Renwick

Richard Turner Rupert Wood Andrew Tait John Sansom
Helen Power Alan Porteous Antony Gomez Garry
DeRose
Keith McNaughton Michael Revell Stacey Dravitzki
Katrina Richards
Sally Garrett Don Thompson Jim Salinger Cliff Revell
Sam Dean Rowena Moss

2. Apologies
Brian Giles Charles Pearson Mikhail Titov Gareth
Renowden
Tony Bromley Neil Gordon David Wratt John Hickman
John Withington Jim McGregor Peter Knudsen
Motion that "the apologies be accepted". Kim Dirks / Simon Kjellberg -
carried.

3. Confirmation of minutes of previous AGM (Kim)
Motion that "the minutes of the previous AGM, held at the University of
Canterbury,
Christchurch on November 21, 2006, be accepted as read".
Kim Dirks / Jim Renwick - carried.

4. Matters arising from the Last AGM (Kim)
Carbon Neutrality
The question of how to achieve carbon neutrality at an AGM was referred on
to the
incoming committee.

Up-coming Conferences
There are two in 2008, the first being held jointly with AMOS and AWES in
Geelong,
Victoria, starting January 29, in lieu of a 2007 conference for us, and the
second being our
official 2008 conference, for which there is a proposal to hold it in
November, jointly with
HydroSoc, in Greymouth NZ. Planning is well advanced for the Geelong
conference
however the new committee will need to being the planning for the November
conference.
(See President's report below for more details.)

Electronic Publishing
Kim noted that about this issue (having been debated extensively by the
committee in the
past as a way of reducing costs) little has been said this year as efforts
to improve the
circulation of the near monthly e-newsletters (accumulated into the
quarterly printed
versions) are being dealt with by individual committee members. Following
the example of
another society Kim belongs to, she suggested members be invited to tick a
box for
receiving the newsletter contents only electronically. The new committee
will continue to
work on this issue.

Comments from the floor noted that the electronic versions were very
successful.

5. President's Report (Kim)
It is my pleasure to present the 2007 Annual Report of the Meteorological
Society of New
Zealand, the 28th report since the founding of the society in 1979.

Summary of Activities
The committee has held five bi-monthly teleconference meetings, the same as
in the last
five years. This year, Auckland held four regional meetings, Wellington held
four and
Dunedin held four. Christchurch held an impressive six, with an additional
17 days of
tutorials, 2 'open day' events and one field trip. This is a significant
increase on recent
years. We see the branch meetings as one of our core activities and one of
the main
opportunities for members who are not able to make it to the AGM to meet up
with other
members and talk 'meteorology'. Thanks to our Vice-Presidents Sally Garrett,
Jim
Renwick, Mikhail Titov and Helen Power for keeping the branch meetings
going. Our
membership has dropped by 17 since last year and now stands at 266. The
reason for this is
something we will need to look into. Rowena Moss, our Circulation Manager
spent a
considerable amount of time this year chasing post codes for the membership.
Note also that
our post box has been changed to Marion Square rather than Te Aro.

Newsletter/Website
This year, Bob McDavitt, our long-standing Newsletter Editor, has continued
with the
electronic versions of the newsletter, along with the printed and posted
version. Newsletter
emails are being sent out about once a month with the printed versions the
usual four times
per year. This seems to be going pretty smoothly thanks to Bob's efforts.
The electronic
versions are good for disseminating information quickly, however, there are
undoubtedly
still some members who still have limited or no access to the internet and
require printed
versions. This is also the case for institutional members. The issue of
electronic publishing
and fees is something that will need to be dealt with by the incoming
committee.

Our web pages continue to be maintained thanks to the efforts of our
webmaster Peter
Knudsen.

Journal
Over the last year, Brian Giles, our journal Editor has been keeping Weather
and Climate up
to date. At this stage there are two papers and a book review for the 2008
issue but he is
seeking more contributions. If you have something you would like to submit,
I am sure
Brian would welcome it. The one outstanding issue for the journal is that of
copyright. It is
generally understood that when an author gets an article published in a
journal, the
copyright is transferred from the author to the organization, upon
publication of the article.
However, a formal copyright transfer agreement has never been put in place
for our journal.
We are in the process of putting together a copyright transfer agreement to
suit our needs
and remove this ambiguity. Brian will be working on getting a document in
place during
2008. We have also decided to move towards an A4 size journal, instead of
the current
'unusual' size. The motivation for this is a considerably reduction in the
publishing costs
associated with production at a 'standard' size.

Upcoming Conferences
The 2007 conference is being held in Melbourne on Jan 29th-1st Feb 2008,
jointly with
AMOS and AWES, the Australasian Wind Engineering Society. The plan at this
stage is
the hold the 2008 conference jointly with the New Zealand Hydrological
society, this time
tentatively planned for Greymouth in November. Charles Pearson will be
involved in the
organization for this conference for the Hydrological Society and is seeking
volunteers to be
on the organizing committee from the Meteorological society side. If you are
keen, please
let the society or Charles know as we would welcome your input.

The International Conference of Southern Hemisphere Meteorology and
Oceanography
(ICSHMO) will be held in Melbourne 9-13 February, 2009. Howard Diamond of
NOAA
will be organizing this conference. He visited New Zealand earlier in the
year and
presented seminars across the country, including several for our society.

Earlier this year, a NZ-Australian bid was put in to host the 2011 IUGG
General Assembly
in Melbourne which was successful. The Society was thanked (by Des Darby)
for its strong
letter of support, along with those of the GSNZ, NZGS, NZHS, NZMSS, and
RASNZ,
which supplemented letters from the Prime Ministers of both Australia and
New Zealand.

Kidson Medal
On November 20th of this year, our Dunedin Vice-President Dr. Helen Power
presented the
Society's Third Edward Kidson Medal to Dr. Xiaogu Zheng of NIWA, for his
co-authored
paper "A study of predictable patterns for seasonal forecasting of New
Zealand rainfall",
published in the Journal of Climate in 2006.
The judging panel considering this year's nominations were unanimous in
their decision to
recommend Dr. Zheng for the award. His work was considered to be outstanding
in regards
to the advancement in science that it provides. One of the judges commented
that "in terms
of seriously advancing knowledge and capability on climate forecasting, the
paper of Dr
Zheng will soon be regarded as a landmark paper, not only for its relevance
to New Zealand
needs but for most regions in the Southern Hemisphere. It provides
remarkable
mathematical rigour to the complex world of integrating different components
of the
climate system." Dr. Zheng is congratulated for his fine achievement.

Hydrology Summer School
The Hydrological Society Summer School is a joint venture of the
Hydrological Society of
New Zealand and our Society, initiated mainly by Paul White. This summer
school is
aimed at raising an interest in Hydrology amongst High School students. The
course ran
successfully last year and will be running again later this year. Our
Committee member
Katrina Richards contributes her expertise to this course. Thank you
Katrina.

Photo competition
Following the success of the last photo competition in 2005, a new
competition is being run,
with the deadline for submissions being June 30, 2008. As of last week there
were no
entries but we hope to see plenty as the deadline approaches. A judging
committee has been
put in place to consider the submissions.

The Future
I would like to finish by thanking all of the 2006/2007 committee members
for their efforts
this year. In particular I would like to thank Simon Kjellberg, our
Secretary, and Richard
Turner, our immediate Past Present. It has been very useful to be able to
seek advice from
you two and to know that you will step in when needed. Also thanks are due
to Cliff Revel
for keeping our finances in good order. I am better at spending money than
saving it so the
healthy financial state of the society is mainly due to Cliff's efforts. The
workshop and
AGM details for today were sorted out mainly by Jim Renwick, Stacey
Dravitzki, Sam
Dean, Richard Turner and Rowena Moss. Thank you to all of you for your
efforts. As many
of the Meteorological Society events are held in Wellington, we tend to lean
significantly
on the committee members in that region in the organising department. This
hasn't gone
unnoticed.

Over the years the membership of the society has slowly decreased. This
could be due to a
decrease in the number of people entering the field or because of easier
access to the
Society's publications via institutional membership. It could also be
because there hasn't
been much effort going into recruiting new members. Perhaps the new
committee could
look into some new ways to raise the profile of the society and make it more
attractive to
people entering the field. Perhaps a new prize could be introduced, aimed at
Young
Meteorologists with membership of the society being one of the criteria. The
prize could be
free registration at the following Annual Conference and maybe a 'Keynote'
presentation?
The committee also needs to continue to think about possible candidates for
honorary
membership as our last one was made quite a few years back.

In 2000, Alex Neale put together a comprehensive document on the history of
the Society
since its founding in 1979. It has now been seven years since this document
has been
updated and I am thinking it may be time for this to be done. At the risk of
giving myself
another job, I wonder if it would be helpful if it could be one of the tasks
of the immediate
Past President to update this document with the significant events that have
occurred during
those Presidencies. This would ensure that we would continue to have an
up-to-date
document as a valuable historical document for the benefit of the
membership.
All the best to the incoming committee for 2008.
Kim Dirks
President of the Meteorological Society of New Zealand (2007)

Cliff noted that Alex Neale's document on the history of the Society, 21
years after it's
founding, has never been published in print.
Bob McDavitt moved a vote of thanks to Kim - seconded by Katrina Richards
and carried.

6. Annual Report from the Treasurer (Cliff)
Meteorological Society of New Zealand Inc.
Cliff Revell presented the Annual audited accounts as published in the
September newsletter.

Cliff also presented a historical summary and budget:
Year a.s. Subs Int C&M Misc Total | Jnrl Newsltr
C&M Misc Total | Net +/-
04/05 25+ 9501 1390 - 1600 12491 | 7764 4476
232 3274 15746 | -3255
05/06 25+ 7971 1686 1478 1822 1295 | 5428 3486 -
5863 14777 | -1820
06/07 25+ 8221 1846 9924 2012 22003 | 12197 5267 97
3701 21262 | +741
(8500) (1600 (-) (3600)(13700) |(12800) (5000) ( - )(3000)
(20800) | (-7100)
07/08* 30+ 9000 1700 - 1600 12300 | 5000 4000 -
3000 12000 | +300
08/09 35+ 10000 1600 - 1600 13200 | 6000 4500 - 4000
14500 | -1300
a.s.=annual subscription,Subs=subscriptions, Int= Interest, C&M=
Conferences&Meetings,
Misc=Miscellaneous, Jnrl=Journal, Newsltr= Newsletter.
*Assumes 1 journal (Vol 29) and 4 newsletters published and continued
support of MetService.
Miscellaneous expenditure includes contingency fund for website, travel &
awards expenses as
well as RSNZ fee and teleconferences.

Cliff explained that, in the historical summary and budget, the bracketed
figures under the
figures for 06/07 were the budgeted figures for this financial year; the key
differences with
the actual figures being the nearly $10,000 windfall profit from the
previous conference and
the reduced income from subscriptions due to falling membership. The 07/08
figures are
based on those available in November 2006 and should now be closer to the
08/09 figures.
The heavily rounded figures reflect a surprisingly wide range of uncertainty
in the budgeted
expenses and receipts for such a small organisation. This raises the
question of whether we
want to continue relying on windfall profits from conferences or use this
money for doing
extra things. A recommended subscription for the next financial year of $35
for individual
members and $105 for institutional members. will bring us back to where we
were about nine
years ago.

Jim Salinger noted that it's now generally accepted that conferences should
return a profit
and drew attention to a recent change in NIWA's CEO, raising the possibility
of a change in
policy towards support for this society. This could mean an annual grant, in
line with the
policy of the MetService, verses subscription subsidies being paid to
individual NIWA
members.

It was moved and passed "that the Annual Accounts, financial report and
historical summary
and budget be accepted"
Cliff Revell / John Sansom

7. Subscription Rate (Kim)
After some clarification of the figures presented by Cliff and related
policies (safe
investments and membership cancellation after 2 years non-payment), Simon
raised the
suggestion that the society set the fee for non-members attending
conferences where we
have a say in this, to something like $20 more so we can offer this as a
discount to
members, including those who join on the spot. Following some agreement from
the floor,
Kim suggested that we put this to the organisers of our 2008 conference in
Greymouth.

Motion "that the subscription rates for the next financial year be raised to
$35 for ordinary
members and $105 for institutional members."
Kim Dirks / Rupert Wood - carried unanimously.

8. Election of Officers (Richard)
The floor was then passed over to Richard Turner, as Immediate Past
President, to carry out
the Election of Officers.

The following nominations for Officers of the Society for 2007/2008 were
made:

President Michael Revell
Auckland VP Sally Garrett
Wellington VP Jim Renwick
Christchurch VP Mikhail Titov
Dunedin VP (vacated by Helen Power for 1 year)**
Secretary Simon Kjellberg
Treasurer Cliff Revell
Journal Editor Brian Giles
Newsletter Editor Bob McDavitt
Circulation Manager Rowena Moss
Webmaster Peter Knudsen
HydroSoc Liaison Charles Pearson
General Committee: Sam Dean,
Stacey Dravitzki,
Katrina Richards
Gareth Renowden
Jim Salinger
Kim Dirks (as Immediate Past President)

There being no other nominations, it was moved that nominations be closed.
Richard Turner / Rowena Moss
Richard declared the above nominees duly elected.
**Deborah Mills has since been approached by the new committee and accepted
an invitation
to be appointed as our Dunedin VP

Finally Bob raised a motion of thanks Richard Turner, now retiring from the
committee.
- Carried.

9. Other matters (Kim)
Increasing Membership
It has become clear that the membership has been declining over the years
and perhaps it
was time that something should be done about it. Simon commented on
suggestions that
declining membership may be due to a lack of any specific membership drives
in recent
times. It was suggested that perhaps the incoming committee could look at
applying a
surcharge (of at least the membership rate) to those attending that are not
members of the
Society.

Annual conference
It was suggested that annual conferences held overseas were very problematic
for our
membership because of the difficulty of many (especially those employed by
NIWA) to
secure funds to be able to attend. Effort should be made for the next joint
conference with
AMOS to have them come to New Zealand. It was also suggested that a climate
change
theme was long overdue and should be considered for an upcoming conference
in the near
future.

Media Awards
It was noted that the media awards are a good opportunity to raise the
profile of the society
and that we should continue the tradition of holding these every two years
or so. The
Newspaper is next on the list of media types to be judged. Bob said that the
next round of
media awards would be something to be looking into by the incoming
committee.

Remembrance of Augie Auer
One of New Zealand's foremost meteorologists, Augie Auer died unexpectedly
earlier this
year so, in his honour, one minute's silence was observed by all.

With no other business put forward, the meeting was declared closed at
5:02PM.