How it began
Charles Meldrum, a Scottish mathematician, moved to the Royal College of Mauritius in 1848 as professor of mathematics. In 1851 he and a group of officials, scientists, planters and military officers founded the Meteorological Society of Mauritius. In 1862 he was appointed government observer in charge of the small observatory at Port Louis. There he analyzed ships' logs to work out the laws of cyclones in the Indian Ocean, and he is credited as the first to confirm empirically that cyclone winds blow in a spiral toward the center of a storm.
Before it existed
Before Meldrum's work, cyclone winds were taken to blow in a circular motion around the storm. Records of storms in the region were already old: accounts of cyclones that struck Mauritius and Réunion between 1733 and 1754 had been published by the Académie des Sciences in Paris. The first public observatory at Port Louis, opened in 1831, treated weather observation as secondary to magnetic measurements and timekeeping for residents and visiting ships.
How it works
Meldrum's method was to collect the logs of ships that had sailed through or near storms in the Indian Ocean and to compare their recorded observations. From this evidence he concluded that the wind in a cyclone does not travel in a closed circle but spirals inward toward the center. The observation was crucial for mariners navigating tropical seas, who needed to judge where a storm center lay from the wind they met.
What lasted
Because the Port Louis site was unsuitable, Meldrum obtained support from Edward Sabine, president of the Royal Society, for a new observatory at Pamplemousses. Its foundation stone was laid in 1870 and the Royal Alfred Observatory was operating by 1874, with the study of storm movement as its main work. Meldrum was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1876.
Where it stands today
The Pamplemousses observatory was demolished in 1961 and its work moved to Vacoas, where the Mauritius Meteorological Services has its headquarters. The service traces its history to the society founded in 1851. A weather radar installed at Trou-aux-Cerfs in 1977 has tracking tropical cyclones as one of its main functions, and the first cyclone followed on it was Fleur in 1978.
