Reflection and review
The papers presented at this meeting have given us a comprehensive account of the state of the art in what one is tempted to call ‘forest meteorology’ though ‘meteorological forestry’ is probably nearer the mark. Older members of the audience like myself who can recall the descriptive and anecdotal nature of the subject in the early 1950s have enjoyed hearing how it has come of age through the painstaking collection of measurements in the field and through the emergence of principles that have guided the development of mathematical models. Forest meteorologists have been fortunate that much of the foundation of their subject has been laid by the pioneers of agricultural meteorology who have had an easier task experimentally and are therefore a little ahead, but not much! A psychologist might have felt quite at home at this meeting because there have been so many references to the way systems ‘behave’. It seemed that systems were ‘well behaved’ when processes being observed were consistent with theoretical predictions where they existed, or with intuition where they did not. Bad behaviour (by a forested catchment in Rob Roy’s territory for example) meant a discrepancy between performance and expectation. We should remember, however, that the recognition of so-called bad behaviour is the first step towards new developments in most branches of science; and that progress in forest meteorology will depend on the skill and patience of people who feel challenged to tackle the anomalies, the uncertainties and the loose ends that we have heard about yesterday and today.