BAMOS
Dec 2018
Associate Professor Lisa Alexander presenting on international engagement in weather and climate at and AMOS seminar.
Both the WCRP and WMO have various committees, expert
teams, or task teams, various members, contributors and
observers. The governance of these organisation is quite a bit
to get your head around to understand how the wheels turn
in these organisations. The WMO has a very long legacy of 145
years. So how does it all work?
The WMO has member countries from around the world, each
with their own ‘Permanent Representative’—usually the head
of the National Meteorological and Hydrological Service of that
country. The WMO is headed by a Secretary-General, Petteri
Taalas with the World Meteorological Congress as its supreme
body. Congress meets every four years with its next meeting in
June 2019 where it will likely decide on a WMO restructure—a
big and exciting change for WMO. WMO invites representatives
from each member country to attend Congress which also
elects a President (currently David Grimes from Canada), a Vice-
President, members of the Executive Council as well as making
key decisions that set the policy for next four years (such as the
WMO restructure).
These decisions then flow through all the other bodies that sit
under the WMO including its various technical commissions
(such as the Commission for Climatology) and Regional
Associations. The WMO has a strong emphasis on representing
diversity of its member countries. As part of this the world is
divided into six Regional Associations from I to VI (using Roman
numerals), Australia is in Regional Association V (RA V) which
encompasses much of the Pacific and parts of South East Asia.
These meet every four years following Congress with the most
recent 17th RA V meeting taking place in October 2018 in
Nuku’alofa, Tonga.
This may sound a bit boring to some but the decisions made
at these meetings can be very profound. One recent example
is Australia’s free access to Japan’s Himawari satellite, granted
as part of the WMO data sharing agreements which includes
the sharing of model data. The inception of IPCC was also an
outcome of WMO.
In many ways the WCRP and WMO share a common aim in
facilitating global strategy development and implementation,
through bringing experts and member countries together (such
as Assoc. Prof. Lisa Alexander). It’s a tremendous opportunity to
contribute to advancing the global capability across a range of
different disciplines, but also learn from the other experts and
community that are working on these challenges.
If this sounds pretty exciting then you might be wondering how
you get involved? As Lisa pointed out in her talk, knowing how
international engagement works and how to get involved is a
bit of a black box. We’re hoping the presentation and this article
will provide some extra information. The WMO is certainly
keen to have greater involvement from more diverse range of
contributors.
So, if you are interested, find someone who is involved in one
of these expert teams, preferably in an area you’d want to be
involved, and have a chat. Find out more about what would be
involved and offer to help out with events or other activities
that might be happening. Like most things, you take small steps
and grow your involvement and contribution. Another great
way to get involved is to get involved at the grass roots level by
joining your state or territory committee or in the many AMOS
activities across the country (including the AMOS conference)
where many friendly experts can give insights.
Images provided by Agata Imielska
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