Looking back on his long career at the Bureau of Meteorology, one of Australia's oldest meteorologists says there is one storm that stands out like no other.
"One of the greatest forecast achievements of my time in the bureau was unquestionably the forecast for the 1998 Sydney to Hobart yacht race," said John Zillman.
With winds reaching similar strengths to a low-category hurricane, the storm retired a record 66 yachts from the race, involved 35 military and civilian aircraft, 27 navy vessels and saw 55 sailors airlifted from their yachts by rescue helicopter. 
"The forecast and the warning was just absolutely brilliantly correct, unfortunately there just wasn't sufficient notice taken of it ... but scientifically and operationally it was just brilliant."
In early   November it was confirmed that the planet had officially passed one degree of warming, half way to the internationally agreed global warming limit.
With that, oceans rise, bushfire seasons are longer and more severe, and extreme weather events become more frequent. But Mr Zillman said it is important to remember "we had extremes then, we have extremes now".
"I personally, from my experience, couldn't detect any significant change to the extremes. It's almost impossible to see any real trend in extremes except by very technical statistical techniques," he said.
"The analysis of all the historical data by the statisticians and the modellers suggest we are having heavier, more intense rainfalls than we used to, but other studies suggest the opposite."
He said, there was certainly "some evidence" the world was experiencing more extremes as well as the observed warming trend.
The 76-year-old meteorologist has seen the science of weather and climate take leaps and bounds, since he first joined the bureau as a cadet in 1957.
Most notably, the science has transformed through technological advances, greater observation capability and the ability to model real physics and dynamics of the atmosphere with powerful computers.
"I think weather services were among the first in the world to use an innovative thing called fax. We used chemically treated paper and it took about 10 minutes for a weather map to be transmitted from, say, Melbourne to Brisbane and Sydney.
"In those days we only tried to get a forecast for the next 24 hours. Now there's skill out to five and six days ... and people by and large wanted the forecasts to be pretty black and white - fine, wet."
And just a week out from the long-awaited UN Paris Climate Conference, he agrees one of the biggest changes has been global perspectives around climate change.
"I would say with absolute certainty, that nobody who did their meteorological training in the '60s and '70s ever imagined there would be such a great global concern about greenhouse warming. It just wasn't seen as all that significant in those days."
Through the early '60s Mr Zillman worked as a forecaster at the Bureau of Meteorology in Sydney and Brisbane, before moving exclusively into weather and climate research policy management until his retirement in 2005.
His work in understanding the physical mechanisms of climate took him to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, where he spent a decade as a principal delegate of Australia.
"Back in the '50s and '60s there was an expectation of long term warming. Then in the '70s there was a scare that went round the international meteorological climate community about threats of a new ice age, which temporarily dented the confidence ... in a warming trend," he said.
"But it was the 1982-83 so-called El Nino event when the combination of media interest, public and political concern and the science started to make it an issue of debate," Mr Zillman said, adding that by this point it was clear "we had to learn to better live with the extremes of climate but also prepare for actual warming".