WMO
World Meteorological Organization, WMO - was established in 1950 and became a specialized agency of the United Nations in 1951. The WMO is headquartered in Geneva with regional offices around the world.
Activities
The WMO was created to promote
- efficient exchange of meteorological observations worldwide
- standardization of meteorological data
- cooperation between meteorological and hydrological services
- development of national meteorological services in less developed countries
- research and training in meteorology and related fields.
The WMO operates various scientific and technical programmes on a range of issues, including
- meteorology (weather and climate)
- operational hydrology and water resources
- environment
- related geophysical sciences
World Weather Watch System
The WMO programmeWorld Weather Watch combines data processing and coordinates observation and communication systems from a worldwide network of stations operated by members.
Global Atmosphere Watch
Global Atmosphere Watch (GAW) is a network of stations monitoring the critical atmospheric parameters and providing scientific data needed to understand and ultimately predict environmental changes on both regional and global scales.
Structure
The World Meteorological Congress is the supreme body of the WMO. Delegates from all member states meet every four years to approve the programme.
The Executive Council conducts all activities of the WMO in accordance with the decisions of the Congress. The council meets once a year or more.
The six regional associations - Africa, Asia, Europe, North and Middle America, South America, Western Pacific - meet every four years to coordinate the decisions of the Congress within their respective regions.
The eight technical commissions are composed of experts for the study of specific areas of competence. Secretariat, headed by the Secretary-General, is the administrative, documentation and information center.
IPCC
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change. IPCC was established by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1988. Its initial task was outlined in UN General Assembly Resolution 43/53 of 6 December 1988. The objective of the IPCC is to provide governments at all levels with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies. IPCC reports are a key input into international climate change negotiations.
More on WMO
The WMO website provides background information, news, programmes, projects, publication lists and essential fulltext reports and documents.
WMO Resources:
- WMO Bulletin is the official journal of the World Meteorological Organization, first published in 1952 and issued twice yearly.
- MeteoWorld
- Library. Conference, annual, statistical and other expert reports as well as publications, working papers, journals, newsletters and information dossiers on meteorology and related topic from WMO.
Key UN documents
- UN Charter in Swedish | in English
- UN System Chart
- Yearbook of the United Nations
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Swedish | in English
- Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action
- Statue of the International Court of Justice
UN documents and publications in catalogues and databases
- United Nations Digital Library offers UN documents and open access publications, UN voting data and speeches, UN maps, Content in 6+ languages. Replaces the traditional online catalogue UNBISnet.
- UN iLibrary UN publications online covering different topics.
- ODS full-text UN documents published from 1993 onward and scanned documents published between 1946 and 1993 in the official languages of the UN.
- Daily list of documents (ODS). Documents published for the day, with full text links, can be found in the United Nations full text database ODS.
- UNBIS Thesaurus a multilingual database of the controlled vocabulary used to describe UN documents.
- Index to proceedings is an annual bibliographic guide to the proceedings and documentation of the major UN organs. The index includes:
- a list of all documents
- a comprehensive subject index
- an index to speeches
- a voting chart of resolutions
- United Nations Documents Index (United Nations Digital Library) References to all documents by subject area are published. A collection of indexes is held by the Dag Hammarskjöld and Law Library, Uppsala, and the Libraries at UN Headquarters in New York and Geneva.