Abbreviation | WMO |
---|---|
Formation | 23 March 1950 |
Type | United Nations specialized agency |
Legal status | Active |
Headquarters | Geneva, Switzerland |
Head | President Abdulla Al Mandous, UAE (since 2023) [1] Secretary-General Celeste Saulo, Argentina since 2024 |
Parent organization | United Nations Economic and Social Council |
Website | wmo.int |
Politicsportal |
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science, climatology, hydrology and geophysics. [2]
The WMO originated from the International Meteorological Organization, a nongovernmental organization founded in 1873 as a forum for exchanging weather data and research. [3] Proposals to reform the status and structure of the IMO culminated in the World Meteorological Convention of 1947, which formally established the World Meteorological Organization. [4] The Convention entered into force on 23 March 1950, and the following year the WMO began operations as an intergovernmental organization within the UN system.
The WMO is made up of 193 countries and territories, and facilitates the "free and unrestricted" exchange of data, information, and research between the respective meteorological and hydrological institutions of its members. [5] [6] It also collaborates with nongovernmental partners and other international organizations on matters related to environmental protection, climate change, resource management, and socioeconomic development. [7]
Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the WMO is governed by the World Meteorological Congress, composed of member states, which meets every four years to set policies and priorities. The Congress is led by an Executive Council led by the President, currently Abdulla Al Mandous of UAE. [8]
The WMO was established by the Convention of the World Meteorological Organization, [9] signed 11 October 1947 and ratified on 23 March 1950. The Convention serves as the constituent treaty of the WMO, setting forth its purposes, governance, and general framework.
The WMO hierarchy:
The annually published WMO Statement on the status of the World Climate [12] provides details of global, regional and national temperatures and extreme weather events. It also provides information on long-term climate change indicators including atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, sea level rise, and sea ice extent. The year 2016 was the hottest year on record, with many weather and climate extremes, according to the most recent WMO report. [13]
As of August 2023, the WMO has a membership of 193 member states and territories. [14]
In keeping with its mandate to promote the standardization of meteorological observations, the WMO maintains numerous code forms for the representation and exchange of meteorological, oceanographical, and hydrological data. The traditional code forms, such as SYNOP, CLIMAT and TEMP, are character-based and their coding is position-based. Newer WMO code forms are designed for portability, extensibility and universality. These are BUFR, and, for gridded geo-positioned data, GRIB.[ citation needed ]
In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a joint creation of the WMO and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), received the Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about anthropogenic (man-made) climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change." [18]
The World Meteorological Day is held annually on 23 March. [19]
WMO states that "the International System of Units (SI) should be used as the system of units for the evaluation of meteorological elements included in reports for international exchange." [20] The following units, which include units which are not SI units, are recommended by the WMO for meteorological observations:
As of 2023, WMO Members include a total of 187 Member States and 6 Member Territories. [33]
Ten United Nations member states are not members of WMO: Equatorial Guinea, Grenada, Liechtenstein, Marshall Islands, Palau, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and San Marino. Cook Islands and Niue are WMO Members but non-members of the United Nations. Vatican City and State of Palestine and the states with limited recognition are not members of either organization.
The six WMO Member Territories are the British Caribbean Territories (joint meteorological organization and membership), [33] French Polynesia, Hong Kong, Macau, Curaçao and Sint Maarten (joint meteorological service and membership) [33] and New Caledonia. (List of all members with admission dates.)
Region I consists of the states of Africa and a few former colonial powers. Region I has 57 member states and no member territories: [34]
Non-member
Region II has 33 member states and 2 member territories. The member states are: [36]
The member territories are:
Region III consists of the states of South America, including France as French Guiana is an overseas region of France. It has a total of 13 member states and no member territories: [37]
Region IV consists of the states of North America, Central America, and the Caribbean, including three European states with dependencies within the region. It has a total of 25 member states and 2 member territories. The member states are: [38]
The two member territories are:
Non-members
Region V consists of 23 member states and 2 member territories. The member states are: [39]
The Cook Islands and Niue (both are in free association with New Zealand)
The member territories are:
Non-members
Region VI consists consist of all the states in Europe as well as some Western Asia. It has 50 member states: [40]
Non-members
A total of ten member states have membership in more than one region. Two nations are members to four different regions, while eight are members of two regions. These nations, with their regions, are as follows:
Morocco is the northwesternmost country which spans from the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean on the north and the west respectively, into large mountainous areas in the interior, to the Sahara desert in the far south. Morocco is a Northern African country, located in the extreme northwest of Africa on the edge of continental Europe. The Strait of Gibraltar separates Spain from Morocco with a 13 kilometres (8.1 mi) span of water. Morocco borders the North Atlantic Ocean to the west, and the western Mediterranean Sea to the north, and has borders with Algeria and disputed Western Sahara.
The International Polar Years (IPY) are collaborative, international efforts with intensive research focus on the polar regions. Karl Weyprecht, an Austro-Hungarian naval officer, motivated the endeavor in 1875, but died before it first occurred in 1882–1883. Fifty years later (1932–1933) a second IPY took place. The International Geophysical Year was inspired by the IPY and was organized 75 years after the first IPY (1957–58). The fourth, and most recent, IPY covered two full annual cycles from March 2007 to March 2009.
Tropical cyclones and subtropical cyclones are named by various warning centers to simplify communication between forecasters and the general public regarding forecasts, watches and warnings. The names are intended to reduce confusion in the event of concurrent storms in the same basin. Once storms develop sustained wind speeds of more than 33 knots, names are generally assigned to them from predetermined lists, depending on the basin in which they originate. Some tropical depressions are named in the Western Pacific, while tropical cyclones must contain a significant amount of gale-force winds before they are named in the Southern Hemisphere.
The International Meteorological Organization was the first organization formed with the purpose of exchanging weather information among the countries of the world. It came into existence from the realization that weather systems move across country boundaries; and that knowledge of pressure, temperature, precipitations, etc., upstream and downstream are needed for weather forecasting. It was superseded by the World Meteorological Organization.
The Köppen climate classification is one of the most widely used climate classification systems. It was first published by German-Russian climatologist Wladimir Köppen (1846–1940) in 1884, with several later modifications by Köppen, notably in 1918 and 1936. Later, German climatologist Rudolf Geiger (1894–1981) introduced some changes to the classification system in 1954 and 1961, which is thus sometimes called the Köppen–Geiger climate classification.
The Bureau of Meteorology is an executive agency of the Australian Government responsible for providing weather services to Australia and surrounding areas. It was established in 1906 under the Meteorology Act, and brought together the state meteorological services that existed before then. The states officially transferred their weather recording responsibilities to the Bureau of Meteorology on 1 January 1908.
The climate in Greece is predominantly Mediterranean. However, due to the country's geography, Greece has a wide range of micro-climates and local variations. The Greek mainland is extremely mountainous, making Greece one of the most mountainous countries in Europe. To the west of the Pindus mountain range, the climate is generally wetter and has some maritime features. The east of the Pindus mountain range is generally drier and windier in summer. The highest peak is Mount Olympus, 2,918 metres (9,573 ft). The northern areas of Greece have a transitional climate between the continental, the Mediterranean and the humid subtropical climate. There are mountainous areas that have an alpine climate. Also, various areas of Greece have semi-arid climates.
A Regional Specialized Meteorological Centre (RSMC) is responsible for the distribution of information, advisories, and warnings regarding the specific program they have a part of, agreed by consensus at the World Meteorological Organization as part of the World Weather Watch.
Traditionally, areas of tropical cyclone formation are divided into seven basins. These include the north Atlantic Ocean, the eastern and western parts of the northern Pacific Ocean, the southwestern Pacific, the southwestern and southeastern Indian Oceans, and the northern Indian Ocean. The western Pacific is the most active and the north Indian the least active. An average of 86 tropical cyclones of tropical storm intensity form annually worldwide, with 47 reaching hurricane/typhoon strength, and 20 becoming intense tropical cyclones, super typhoons, or major hurricanes.
ʽAziziya, sometimes spelled El Azizia, is a small town and capital of the Jafara district in northwestern Libya, 41 kilometres (25 mi) southwest of the capital Tripoli. From 1918 to 1922, it was the capital of the Tripolitanian Republic, the first formal republic in the Arab world. Before 2001, it was part of the ʽAziziya District and served as its capital. ʽAziziya is a major trade centre of the Sahel Jeffare plateau, being on a trade route from the coast to the Nafusa Mountains and the Fezzan region to the south. As of 2006, the town's population has been estimated at 23,399.
The practice of using names to identify tropical cyclones goes back several centuries, with storms named after places, saints or things they hit before the formal start of naming in each basin. Examples of such names are the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane and the 1938 New England hurricane. The system currently in place provides identification of tropical cyclones in a brief form that is easily understood and recognized by the public. The credit for the first usage of personal names for weather systems is given to the Queensland Government Meteorologist Clement Wragge, who named tropical cyclones and anticyclones between 1887 and 1907. This system of naming fell into disuse for several years after Wragge retired, until it was revived in the latter part of World War II for the Western Pacific. Over the following decades, formal naming schemes were introduced for several tropical cyclone basins, including the North and South Atlantic, Eastern, Central, Western and Southern Pacific basins as well as the Australian region and Indian Ocean.
World Meteorological Day was established in 1951 to commemorate the establishment of the World Meteorological Organization on 23 March 1950. This organization announces a slogan for World Meteorological Day every year, and this day is celebrated in all member countries.
The International Meteorological Organization Prize is awarded annually by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) for outstanding contributions in the field of meteorology and, since 1971, the field of operational hydrology.
Jukka Petteri Taalas is a Finnish meteorologist and former Secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization. Appointed in 2015 by the World Meteorological Congress, the supreme body of the Organization, he took up the four-year Secretary-General term on 1 January 2016, and was re-elected to a second four-year term on 13 June 2019. He was director general of the Finnish Meteorological Institute from 2002 to 2005 and 2007 to 2015.
Godwin Olu Patrick Obasi was a Nigerian meteorologist and the secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) from 1984 to 2003. He was the first secretariat employee to be named secretary-general and the first African to serve as the head of a UN agency.
Including country codes