Meteorological Cooperative › About the cooperative
About the cooperative
The Meteorological Cooperative of the Republic is a cooperative holding a public mandate by organic law. It observes the atmosphere, the ground and the water of the territory, issues the public forecast, maintains the climate record, operates the three warning systems, and keeps the catalogue of endemic species. It exercises no public authority and answers to its members and to the organs that gave it the mandate.
What a public mandate means
An organ of the Republic exercises authority: it decides, it binds and it may be resisted through the courts. The cooperative does none of these things. Its mandate is an obligation to perform certain functions and to publish what it finds, together with the allocation of labour and material needed to do so.
The distinction has practical consequences. The cooperative fixes no ceiling, sets no building standard, closes no road and orders no evacuation. It measures, estimates and publishes. Ceilings belong to the Ecological Budget Authority, building standards to the organ acting under Article 178 (1)(b), road closures to the route operator, and evacuation to the commune.
Members elect its council, and may be removed by it. The mandate may be withdrawn by the organs that conferred it, and the cooperative would continue as a cooperative without the mandate, holding the archive it built.
History
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1901 | Founded as the Fluidian Weather Society; the Lindoma station begins its record |
| 1911 | First printed synoptic chart issued; the ochre and sand of those sheets remain the colours of this site |
| 1919 | Coastal stations established at Maravel and Cortius |
| 1934 | The Belvacius earthquake; the society begins seismic recording |
| 1948 | Radiosonde ascents begin at Lindoma |
| 1949 | Public mandate conferred; the society reconstitutes as a cooperative |
| 1962 | Instrumental seismic catalogue begins on a national footing |
| 1971 | Numerical forecasting begins on borrowed computing time |
| 1977 | Coastal and marsh monitoring begins at Merrisoma |
| 1991 | First weather radar, at Cortius |
| 1994 | Mandate restated after the constitutional settlement; printed charts discontinued |
| 2003 | Flux measurement begins on the Kelvaqui peat |
| 2017 | The Sornorum floods; the flood system is proposed the following year |
| 2019 | The Belvacius event of February; the earthquake system is proposed |
| 2021 | REP-KJS enters service |
| 2024 | REP-LEW enters service |
| 2025 | REP-FEW enters service |
How the work is organised
| Section | Members | Responsibility |
|---|---|---|
| Observation | 640 | The station network, siting, calibration and field maintenance |
| Forecasting | 310 | The duty desks, the model chain, verification and the public bulletins |
| Climate and inventory | 185 | The homogenised record, the emissions inventory, the sink measurement |
| Seismology and hazard | 220 | The catalogue, the hazard maps, REP-KJS, REP-LEW and REP-FEW |
| Instrumentation | 265 | Station design, firmware, receiver boards, the conformance harness |
| Archive and publication | 150 | The archive, the feeds, the repositories and this site |
| Coastal and biological monitoring | 70 | Marsh, lagoon and dune stations; the species catalogue |
Relations with the ecological organs
Data collection is shared. Emissions inventories, water quality series and habitat records are gathered jointly with the ecological organs. The cooperative publishes the physical measurements, and the Ecological Budget Authority publishes the ceilings drawn from them. Neither body audits the other, and both publish the raw series, so a disagreement between them is visible to anybody who looks.
The Audit Office examines consumption against the ceilings and takes the physical quantities from the same published inventory. Species assessment is done by the university groups holding the relevant expertise, with the cooperative supplying the monitoring and taking no part in assigning a category.
Publication practice
Everything published is free of charge and requires no registration, licence or account.
The public feed is the same feed the cooperative uses internally, in the same format, with no reduced version.
Failures are published on the same footing as successes. Every missed event, every overstated warning and every false alert appears in the register for the system concerned.
Rejected observations are retained in the archive with the reason for rejection.
What the cooperative declines to do
It attributes trends and abstains from attributing single events, since a statement that one storm was caused by warming exceeds what the method supports.
It recommends no device over another, and certification states only that a device was tested and passed.
It takes no position on whether the emissions position of the Republic is satisfactory. The measured quantities go to the organs that decide, and the trend is published with its qualifications attached.
Reaching the cooperative
Enquiries, fault reports and requests for data go through the public information system. Reports concerning the warning path are handled first, and the register of such reports is published with the answers given.
Enquiries about the lagoon and its species go to the coastal monitoring station at Marendo. Enquiries about the seismic catalogue go to the seismology section at Corcina.