Meteorology, Meteorological, History

An IGO
monit-
oring
weather and
climate
change

HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p46.

HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p44.

p45

To ensure that political influence matched financial contribution, the document advocated that voting procedures should reflect the percentage of contribution of Member States. And as a means of imposing financial discipline, the document suggested that each programme should have multi-year funding and a fixed financial envelope.

Finally, the document argued, there might come a time when European governments were prepared to pay for routine climate monitoring. Should that happen, how the Organisation conducted its business would influence whether governments would entrust the task to EUMETSAT.

As 1990 progressed, internal discussions at EUMETSAT turned increasingly to whether the Organisation should enlarge its remit to include climate monitoring. The subject had been raised before EUMETSAT was formed when Mohr, Bizzarri, Pastre and Morgan discussed the issue informally in a Parisian cafe¹⁰. The four concluded that Member States did not wish to pursue the idea because they wished to keep staff members in the new intergovernmental Organisation low.

By 1990, the subject of climate monitoring had become politically significant and a number of delegates thought that EUMETSAT should encompass the task within its remit. The idea made sense because operational meteorology makes use of observations that are also of value to climate monitoring. EUMETSAT's evaluation of its role in climate monitoring was timely. Governments were debating international policies intended to protect the atmosphere and environment from human activities such as burning fossil fuel and releasing CFCs, and intergovernmental organisations, including ESA and the European Commission, were holding debates about Earth observation policy.

It was against this backdrop that the PAC first put the idea of expanding the EUMETSAT Convention to include climate monitoring to its eighth meeting in October 1990. The general attitude was positive, though some delegates expressed concern that EUMETSAT's primary objective of "exploiting European weather satellites" should not be compromised. At the end of the discussion, the Chairman said that the time was right to begin considering the Organisation's role with regard to climate and environmental monitoring. The conclusion of EUMETSAT's deliberations was to add as an additional operational objective in its Convention the task of contributing to operational monitoring of the climate and the detection of global climate change.

This addition was included in the amended Convention submitted to the fifteenth Council meeting in June 1991. Inclusion of the climate monitoring amendment proved important to the success of EUMETSAT's cooperation with ESA, not only because of what it said, but because of what it did not say. Morgan, EUMETSAT's Director at the time, says that by making no claim to operate generic environmental satellites or to support experimental missions, the Organisation made clear that it was not

10 - The information comes from interviews with the author.

SEE ALSO| |

1. Meteorologists shed political shackles, a review of Declan Murphy's history of the first 25 years of EUMETSAT (2011), by Helen Gavaghan.

2. An interview in 2010 with Dr Tillman Mohr, a special advisor to the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organisation, in Science, People & Politics.

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Contents

Preface

Foreword

Introduction

Ch.1

Ch.2

Ch.3

Ch.4

Ch.5

Ch.6

Ch.7

Ch.8

The History of EUMETSAT is available in English and French from EUMETSAT©.
First printed 2001. ISBN 92-9110-040-4

Eumetsat meteorology meteorological artificial satellites
European Space Agency weather climate policy politics history