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BAMOS
Special Issue
Figure 4 ( right ): Sir William Napier Shaw ( 1854 – 1945 ) who served as President of the IMO from 1907 to 1923 and championed international data exchange as the foundation and guiding principle of international cooperation in meteorology . © WMO .
Figure 5 ( top ): The first President of WMO , Dr Francis Reichelderfer of the US , signs the WMO Convention on 11 October 1947 . He is watched by the last President of IMO , Sir Nelson Johnson of the UK ( left ), and Mr Norman Warren of Australia . The latter had chaired the IMO Committee that negotiated the final text of the Convention . © WMO .
The birth of WMO
It was , in fact , governments ’ responsibility for regulation of international civil aviation and the increasing governmental role in data exchange that convinced the 1940s leaders of the IMO that the time had come to turn the primarily nongovernmental IMO into the fully intergovernmental ( but still determinedly scientific ) WMO ( Daniel , 1973 ).
The 1947 WMO Convention ( Figure 5 ) identified the collection , exchange and application of meteorological and related geophysical data as the basic raison d ’ etre for international cooperation and for the existence and operation of WMO ( Davies , 1990 ). The Commission for Climatology organised the mail collection of data for research . The Commission for Synoptic Meteorology ( later to become the Commission for Basic Systems ) focussed on the collection and exchange of observations for real-time practical application .
The International Geophysical Year
With the WMO Convention and constituent bodies in place , the 1957 – 58 International Geophysical Year ( IGY ) reinforced and integrated the twin motives and channels for data collection and exchange : research data from special IGY observing networks quality controlled and published on WMO Microcards ; operational data from the enhanced networks collected through telegraphic channels and used to support the realtime operation of the IGY Weather Central at Little America in Antarctica ( Astapenko , 1960 ) as well as adding to the information flowing into forecasting offices in many countries .
But the IGY played an even more important role as the USSR launch of Sputnik-1 in 1957 and the US launch of the first weather satellite Tiros-1 in 1960 provided international meteorology with the credibility and the opportunity to use the geopolitics of the Cold War and the dawn of the space age to trigger the remarkable US-USSR cooperation that would give birth to the World Weather Watch and the Global Atmospheric Research Programme ( GARP ).