MEDIA RELEASE

No official release made

The Minister for the Environment and Heritage, Senator the Hon Robert Hill, has congratulated the World Meteorological Organisation on its 50th anniversary, being celebrated on World Meteorological Day, Thursday March 23.

With 185 member countries, Senator Hill said the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) was regarded as one of the most effective specialised agencies of the United Nations. "For more than 100 years, the international meteorological community has cooperated in gathering and distributing weather information without regard to political or economic boundaries, providing the best possible forecasting and warning services," Senator Hill said.

This tradition of international cooperation provided the trigger for the establishment of the WMO as an intergovernmental organisation in 1950. The UN Secretary-General Mr Kofi Annan had described the WMO as the "original networker", and one of the most farsighted organisations in the UN system.

While it had many programs designed to share technology and knowledge, Senator Hill said the cornerstone of the WMO was the free and unrestricted flow of weather data from observation equipment as diverse as polar-orbiting satellites above the Antarctic to traditional instrument boxes at Uluru.

For Australia, the WMO's cooperative data collection system known as the World Weather Watch brought the benefits of free access to Japanese and North American satellite data, but it also brought responsibilities. The Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne operates one of only three World Meteorological Centres, producing weather maps and forecast charts for the entire globe. It processes the information from a network of 10,000 surface and 900 upper-air stations, 700 voluntary observing ships, drifting ocean buoys and automated aircraft systems.

The detailed information is particularly valuable to Australia's neighbouring countries in the Pacific and in South-East Asia, he said. He recalled the Bureau's role in assisting the countries of South-East Asia with forecasts of smoke dispersion from the fires in Indonesia during the major El Nino event in 1997-98.

Senator Hill said one of the more important initiatives of the WMO had been the formation of the World Climate Programme in 1979 to assist nations in the use of climate data and to help manage the potential impact of climate change. In conjunction with the United Nations Environment Programme, the WMO had also established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988 to assess the science and potential impact of climate change.

Another important initiative was WMO's Global Atmosphere Watch, which monitored changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Australia's baseline air pollution station at Cape Grim in north-west Tasmania is one of 22 global baseline stations.

Senator Hill said the WMO had been a leader in the push for natural disaster mitigation, particularly through its involvement in the United Nations' International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction from 1990 to 2000. Through initiatives such as its Tropical Cyclone Program, the WMO has reduced the destructive impact of hundreds of tropical cyclones that affected millions of people, and had led to major improvements in early warning systems in many nations.

The WMO has also fostered the transfer of knowledge through training programs. Over the past 30 years, some 500 overseas trainees from more than 20 countries, including many countries of the South Pacific, have successfully completed their basic meteorological training in Australia.

Ends