Meteorology as infrastructural globalism

Osiris

Volumn 21, Issue , 2006, Pages 229-250

  Edwards, Paul N ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33748534483     PISSN: 03697827     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/507143     Document Type: Article

References (98)

1. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1996) (emphasis in original).
2. David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, and Culture (Stanford, 1999).
3. Martin Hewson, "Did Global Governance Create Informational Globalism?" in Approaches to Global Governance Theory, ed. Martin Hewson and Timothy J. Sinclair (Albany, N.Y., 1999), 97-113.
4. Quoted in Napier Shaw, The Drama of Weather (Cambridge, 1939).
5. The Bergen School developed the crucial theory of polar fronts around 1920, but the same school's actual forecast techniques remained chiefly empirical. See Robert Marc Friedman, Appropriating the Weather: Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Construction of a Modern Meteorology (Ithaca, 1989);
6. and Frederik Nebeker, Calculating the Weather: Meteorology in the 20th Century (New York, 1995).
7. On implementing a uniform time standard for meteorological observations in the United States, see Ian R. Bartky, "The Adoption of Standard Time," Technology and Culture 30 (1989): 25-56.
8. On problems with the Brussels Convention standard naval logbook, see James R. Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York, 1998).
9. For example, some nations used British units, while others used the metric system. Standard observing hours, methods of sea surface temperature measurement, and a myriad of other seemingly small details produced tremendous headaches for those trying to integrate data sets across national borders.
10. Howard Daniel, "One Hundred Years of International Co-Operation in Meteorology (1873-1973): A Historical Review," WMO Bulletin 22 (1973): 164.
11. U.S. Army Signal Office, Bulletin of International Meteorological Observations Taken Simultaneously (Washington, D.C., 1875-1884).
12. Similar efforts to build very large-scale data networks began around the same time in other geophysical sciences, including seismology and oceanography. All of them suffered from standardization problems and long publication delays. See R. D. Adams, "The Development of Global Earthquake Recording," in Observatory Seismology, ed. J. J. Litehiser (Berkeley, 1989), 3-24;
13. Elisabeth T. Crawford, Terry Shinn, and Sverker Sœrlin, Denationalizing Science: The Contexts of International Scientific Practice (Boston, 1993);
14. Robert Stoneley, "The History of the International Seismological Summary," Geophysical Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 20 (1970): 343-9. I am grateful to Kai-Henrik Barth for drawing this literature to my attention.
15. Great Britain Meteorological Office, Réseau Mondial, 1910: Monthly and Annual Summaries of Pressure, Temperature, and Precipitation at Land Stations (London, 1920), iv-v.
16. Part of the Treaty of Versailles, the convention entered into force in 1922.
17. Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York, 1985).
18. Daniel, "One Hundred Years" (cit. n. 9).
19. Ibid.
20. Tor Bergeron, "Methods in Scientific Weather Analysis and Forecasting," in The Atmosphere and the Sea in Motion, ed. Bert Bolin (New York, 1959), 440-74;
21. Friedman, Appropriating the Weather (cit. n. 5);
22. Nebeker, Calculating the Weather (cit. n. 5). The polar fronts, a marked feature of the global atmospheric circulation, are the boundaries between polar and mid-latitude air in each hemisphere. Their locations vary seasonally between about 30° and 60°.
23. G. R. Jenkins, "Transmission and Plotting of Meteorological Data," in Handbook of Meteorology, ed. F. A. Berry Jr., Eugene Bollay, and Norman R. Beers (New York, 1945), 574.
24. Quoted in Daniel, "One Hundred Years" (cit. n. 9), 174.
25. Clark A. Miller, "Scientific Internationalism in American Foreign Policy: The Case of Meteorology, 1947-1958," in Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance, ed. Clark A. Miller and Paul N. Edwards (Cambridge,, Mass., 2001), 167-218.
26. World Meteorological Organization, Basic Documents (Excluding the Technical Regulations) (Geneva, 1971), 9.
27. For membership figures, see Daniel, "One Hundred Years" (cit. n. 9), 187;
28. and Sir Arthur Davies, Forty Years of Progress and Achievement, WMO-721 (Geneva, 1990), 151-2.
29. "Second World Meteorological Congress," WMO Bulletin 4(3) (1955), 94.
30. For Ramirez, as for other members of the Communist bloc, this category included individual republics of the Soviet Union, which were still arguing (unsuccessfully) for separate representation at the United Nations. It also incorporated the Communist governments of divided nations such as Germany (not admitted to the UN until 1973), Vietnam (1977), and Korea (1991).
31. The Ramirez-Cressman exchange is recorded in World Meteorological Organization, "Sixth World Meteorological Congress, Geneva, April 5-30, 1971: Proceedings," in Congress Proceedings, WMO CP-6 (Geneva, 1972), 162-3 (Ramirez), 164 (Cressman).
32. For a review see Held et al., Global Transformations (cit. n. 2), chap. 1.
33. WMO Commission for Synoptic Meteorology, Abridged Final Report of the First Session, Washington, 2nd-29th April, 1953, CSM-1/WM0-16 (Geneva, 1953), 41 (my italics).
34. "Second World Meteorological Congress" (cit. n. 23), 95.
35. For example, the American Heritage Dictionary (New York, 2000) defines infrastructure as "the basic facilities, services, and installations needed for the functioning of a community or society, such as transportation and communications systems, water and power lines, and public institutions including schools, post offices, and prisons."
36. On these concepts, see Paul N. Edwards, "Infrastructure and Modernity: Scales of Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems," in Modernity and Technology, ed. Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 185-22;
37. Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, Mass., 1999);
38. Thomas P. Hughes, "The Evolution of Large Technological Systems," in The Social Construction of Technological Systems, ed. Wiebe Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 51-82.
39. Anthony Giddens, "Agency, Institution, and Time-Space Analysis," in Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies, ed. Karin Knorr-Cetina and Aaron V Cicourel (Boston, 1981), 161-74
40. idem, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley, 1984).
41. World Meteorological Organization, Final Report: First Congress of the World Meteorological Organization, Paris, 19 March-28 April 1951 (Geneva, 1951), 10.
42. Ruben P. Mendez, United Nations Development Programme, http://www.yale.edu/unsy/UNDPhist.htm.
43. Miller, "Scientific Internationalism" (cit. n. 20).
44. Daniel, "One Hundred Years" (cit. n. 9).
45. See, e.g., Consolidated Report on the Voluntary Assistance Programme Including Projects Approved for Circulation in 1971, WMO-323 (Geneva, 1972).
46. Miller, "Scientific Internationalism" (cit. n. 20).
47. Ibid.
48. J. Van Mieghem, Problem of the Professional Training of Meteorological Personnel of All Grades in the Less-Developed Countries, WMO TN-50 (Geneva, 1963).
49. Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).
50. In practice, NWP and weather control remained separate research tracks. See Paul N. Edwards, "The World in a Machine: Origins and Impacts of Early Computerized Global Systems Models," in Systems, Experts, and Computers, ed. Thomas P. Hughes and Agatha C. Hughes (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 221-54;
51. James R. Fleming, "Fixing the Weather and Climate: Military and Civilian Schemes for Cloud Seeding and Climate Engineering," in The Technological Fix, ed. Lisa Rosner (New York, 2004), 175-200;
52. Kristine C. Harper, "Research from the Boundary Layer: Civilian Leadership, Military Funding, and the Development of Numerical Weather Prediction (1946-55)," Social Studies of Science 33 (2003): 667-96;
53. Chunglin Kwa, "The Rise and Fall of Weather Modification: Changes in American Attitudes towards Technology, Nature, and Society," in Miller and Edwards, Changing the Atmosphere (cit. n. 20), 135-66;
54. John von Neumann, "Can We Survive Technology?" Fortune (June 1955): 106-8, 151-2.
55. Kwa, "Weather Modification" (cit. n. 41).
56. John F. Fuller, Thor's Legions: Weather Support to the U.S. Air Force and Army, 1937-1987 (Boston, 1990);
57. Committee on Atmospheric Sciences, U.S. National Research Council, "The Status of Research and Manpower in Meteorology," Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 41 (1960): 554-62.
58. Gerald L. Barger, Climatology at Work (Washington, D.C., 1960).
59. Fuller, Thor's Legions (cit. n. 43);
60. David M. Hart and David G. Victor, "Scientific Elites and the Making of U.S. Policy for Climate Change Research," Soc. Stud. Sci. 23 (1993): 643-80.
61. For example, the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) operated independent military weather satellites - nearly identical to their civilian counterparts - from 1962 until 1994, when the civil and military meteorological satellite programs were combined. R. Cargill Hall, "A History of the Military Polar Orbiting Meteorological Satellite Program," Quest 9(2) (2002): 4-25.
62. Fuller, Thor's Legions (cit. n. 43).
63. Gerald S. Schatz, The Global Weather Experiment: An Informal History (Washington, D.C., 1978).
64. Richard Davis, U.S. National Climatic Data Center, interview with author, 1998, Asheville, N.C.
65. John Cloud, personal email, July 7, 1997.
66. Abraham Schnapf, "The Tiros Meteorological Satellites - Twenty-Five Years: 1960-1985," in Monitoring Earth's Ocean, Land, and Atmosphere from Space: Sensors, Systems, and Applications, ed. Abraham Schnapf (New York, 1985), 51-70.
67. Margaret E. Courain, Technology Reconciliation in the Remote-Sensing Era of United States Civilian Weather Forecasting: 1957-1987 (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers Univ., 1991).
68. Miller, "Scientitic Internationalism" (cit. n. 20);
69. Clark A. Miller and Paul N. Edwards, "Introduction: The Globalization of Climate Science and Climate Politics," in Miller and Edwards, Changing the Atmosphere (cit. n. 20), 1-30.
70. Ronald E. Doel and Allan A. Needell, "Science, Scientists, and the CIA: Balancing International Ideals, National Needs, and Professional Opportunities," in Eternal Vigilance? Fifty Years of the CIA, ed. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones and Christopher Andrew (London, 1997), 59-91;
71. Allan A. Needell, Science, Cold War, and the American State: Lloyd V Berkner and the Balance of Professional Ideals (Amsterdam, 2000).
72. Ronald E. Doel, "Constituting the Postwar Earth Sciences: The Military's Influence on the Environmental Sciences in the USA after 1945," Soc. Stud. Sci. 33 (2003): 635-66.
73. Edwards, The Closed World (cit. n. 40), chap. 3.
74. Aleksandr K. Khrgian, Meteorology: A Historical Survey, 2nd ed., ed. Kh. P. Pogosyan and trans. Ron Hardin (Jerusalem, 1970).
75. Comité Spécial de l'Année Géophysique Internationale, "The Fourth Meeting of the CSAGI," in Annals of the International Geophysical Year, ed. M. Nicolet (New York, 1958), 297-395;
76. Sir Harold Spencer Jones, "The Inception and Development of the International Geophysical Year," in Annals of the International Geophysical Year, ed. Sydney Chapman (New York, 1959), 383-414.
77. Davies, Forty Years (cit. n. 22), 74-5. A full set of 16,500 IGY microcards cost about $6,000. same data set required about 10 million punch cards, weighing approximately thirty tons.
78. See Barger, Climatology at Work (cit. n. 44).
79. Davies, Forty Years (cit. n. 22), 75.
80. Catalogue of IGY/IGC Meteorological Data, IGY-4//WMO-135 (Geneva, 1962);
81. Catalogue of Meteorological Data for Research, parts 1 and 2, WMO-174 (Geneva, 1965);
82. Catalogue of Meteoroogical Data for Research, part 3, Meteorological Data Recorded on Media Usable by Automatic Data-Processing Machines, WMO-174 (Geneva, 1972).
83. Jule G. Charney, R. Fjørtoft, and John von Neumann, "Numerical Integration of the Barotropic Vorticity Equation," Tellus 2 (1950): 237-54;
84. P. D. Thompson, "A History of Numerical Weather Prediction in the United States," Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. 64 (1983): 755-69.
85. McGeorge Bundy, "National Security Action Memorandum No. 101: Follow-up on the President's Speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 26, 1961," available in the Federation of American Scientists' Intelligence Resource Program online archive of official documents (Washington, D. C.), http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/ nsam-jfk/index.html.
86. Available online via the "Index of Online General Assembly Resolutions Relating to Outer Space," United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, Vienna, http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/SpaceLaw/ gares/.
87. N. G. Leonov, H. P. Marx, and WMO, Requirements and Specifications for Data-Processing System, WWW Planning Report No. 8 (Geneva, 1966);
88. T. Thompson, Telecommunications Problems in Computer-to-Computer Data Transfer, VVWW Planning Report WWW-PR-3 (Geneva, 1966);
89. U.S. Weather Bureau, The World Weather Watch: An International System to Serve All Nations (Washington, D.C., 1965);
90. WMO, Planning of the Global Telecommunication System, WWW Planning Report No. 16 (Geneva, 1966);
91. idem, The Role of Meteorological Satellites in the World Weather Watch, WWW Planning Report No. 18 (Geneva, 1967);
92. idem, World Weather Watch: Status Report on Implementation (Geneva, 1968).
93. WMO Resolution 40, adopted at the Twelfth World Meteorological Congress (1995), reafffirms the principle of free exchange of basic data and defines a set of shared "supplemental" data that cannot be used commercially in the country of origin. For example, French supplemental data cannot be used to make French forecasts that are sold instead of freely distributed.
94. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC Second Assessment - Climate Change 1995: A Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Geneva, 1995), 5, http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/sa(E).pdf.
95. Climate Change 2001: Synthesis Report, ed. Robert T. Watson and the Core Writing Team (Geneva, 2001), 5, http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/un/syreng/spm.pdf.
96. U.S. Climate Action Report (Washington, D.C., May 2002).
97. Thomas C. Peterson, David R. Easterling, Thomas R. Karl et al., "Homogeneity Adjustments of In Situ Atmospheric Climate Data: A Review," International Journal of Climatology 18 (1998): 1493-517;
98. Thomas C. Peterson and Russell S. Vose, "An Overview of the Global Historical Climatology Network Temperature Database," Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. 78 (1997): 2837-49.