The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is 70. In the second half of the 19th century, many economically developed countries realized the importance of meteorological information both for the people and for various sectors of economy (agriculture, shipping, etc.). National hydrometeorological services already worked in many countries. The idea of their cooperation, including exchange of hydrometeorological information emerged among scientists, professional meteorologists, physicists, chemists. This led to the establishment of the International Meteorological Organization (IMO) in 1879 at the International Meteorological Congress in Rome. Formally, it was not an intergovernmental organization. To a large extent, it was functioning as a society of heads of national hydrometeorological services and prominent meteorologists. Nevertheless, in the framework of this organization at the beginning of the twentieth century, the idea of organizing a global network of meteorological stations was born, and its basic parameters were outlined. The idea of a climate database was formulated and implemented, and the first sets of such data appeared. The subsequent development and the increased scale of the IMO's work showed that it is necessary to give this activity an intergovernmental status. In 1950, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) was established, which already acted as a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN). The subsequent development of WMO was in fact interdisciplinary. Its work encompassed research and monitoring of the Earth’s system, especially its climatic subsystem. Among the global initiatives of WMO in the field of climate, it is necessary to note the establishment of the Global Climate Observing System and the World Climate Research Programme, the establishment (jointly with the United Nations Environment Programme) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the development and implementation of the Global Framework for Climate Services. The WMO space program focused on the elaboration and implementation of remote sensing methodologies for the Earth’s system monitoring and research is a particularly important direction of the current and future methodological and technological activity of WMO.
WORLD METEOROLOGICAL ORGANIZATION: 70 YEARS