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RESEARCH
to students in the course. This continued during 1961 and attention was given to the possibility of finding methods of housing alter- native to the current multi-storey developments. Thesis subjects included the design of a cotton mill on a steeply sloping site, the development of Stonecutters Island as a holiday centre and housing for the fishing community.
In the University Library research continues on the rare books in the Fung Ping Shan Chinese Section, and work on an annotated catalogue is nearly complete.
GOVERNMENT
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Fisheries Research is the responsibility of the Fisheries Research Station which is part of the Co-operative Development and Fisheries Department. This work is dealt with in detail in Chapter 7.
ROYAL OBSERVATORY
Research and Applied Meteorology. In recent years the Royal Observatory has undertaken extensive investigations in the field of Applied Meteorology to obtain information for the engineering design of major development projects in the Colony. In the year under review these demands lessened and it was possible to carry out more research in pure meteorology and geophysics.
The Observatory completed an investigation into the frequency of occurrence of various rainfall amounts in specified intervals to assist in the design of reservoir catchments. The scope of this work is being increased by obtaining data on the variation of the intensity of rainfall with distance from the centre of individual rainstorms.
A study of the diurnal variation of rainfall over south-east Asia and countries in the south-west Pacific Ocean was begun, and made some progress.
It is important to develop reliable methods of forecasting the movement of typhoons, and two investigations in this field made good progress during the year. A method of predicting typhoon movement using the pressure distribution at 10,000 feet was developed; this was tried operationally on storms and worked well. The method is now being applied to a large number of past storms to obtain a better assessment of its reliability. In another study,