After the war he worked at the
Meteorological Office in London prior to taking up a position at the Carnegie Institution managing a new observatory at Watheroo, north of Perth in Western Australia. He joined the Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne, Australia in 1921 and only two years later was made responsible for its Research Division. In 1924 he was elected a fellow of the Institute of Physics and was awarded a DSc from the
University of New Zealand for his research on cloud heights. In 1927 Kidson was appointed Dominion Meteorologist by
Earnest Marsden. At the time the
New Zealand Meteorological Service was a very small institution with a staff of five and a complete lack of useful long-period meteorological records. Kidson recognised the value of accurate forecasting for farming, shipping and aviation. One of his early studies was an analysis of meteorological conditions during the first flight across the
Tasman Sea piloted by
Sir Charles Kingsford Smith. In 1937 he convened a conference to plan for enhanced aviation meteorology for the south-west Pacific. By 1939, specialised aviation forecasting had become a routine part of the Meteorological Service's activities. Later in his career he made a number of visits to
Norway, at the time the centre of advanced meteorological research. Whilst there, he was exposed to the latest developments in analysis of weather data which he brought back to New Zealand. This scientific connection was further enhanced through a personal correspondence he maintained with
Jacob Bjerknes during the 1930s and was furthered with a visit to New Zealand by meteorologist
Jørgen Holmboe, in 1934. Holmboe was en route to join the
Lincoln Ellsworth Antarctic Expedition (which included the Australian explorer
Sir Hubert Wilkins). This enabled a collaboration that resulted in a number of papers and a rapid enhancement in weather forecasting in New Zealand. ==The Edward & Isabel Kidson Scholarship==