The National Meteorological Service (SMN), the third state agency to be founded worldwide, turns 150 next Tuesday with the challenge of recovering its place among the “pioneers” of the activity, but also of recovering something of the “collaborative development” -with other institutions and with citizens in general- that characterized its first decades of life.
“For the creation of what was initially called the Argentine Meteorological Office (OMA), Sarmiento’s extraordinary vision intervened, summoning him to the American astronomer Benjamín Gould to create an astronomical observatory and he is the one who warns of the need to also create an articulated system for taking of meteorological observations in such a large country”, Celeste Saulo, director of the SMN, told Télam.
“The interesting thing is that it was born as a state agency with a law that sanctions creation, something unusual still in the world where scientific societies were the ones that made the measurements,” added the also vice president of the World Meteorological Organization
In fact, when the law creating the OMA was passed on October 4, 1872, similar agencies only existed in the United States (1870) and Hungary (1871).
“Initially they observed the state of the weather but forecasts were not yet made: it will be necessary to wait until 1904 to establish that the estimation of a future state is a feasible problem to be tackled”(FW)Celeste Saulo(FW)
“As a country we had wonderful moments in the field of knowledge and the meteorological service was no stranger to that, but we also had disastrous moments that did not allow sustained growth. That is why, although Argentina was a pioneer for a long time, we were not able to maintain that record. “, he added.
The founder and first director of the OMN Benjamin Gould was given the task of “writing a guide to make the observations in a coordinated way”but also to systematize the annual publication of the observations.
“All that sustained work over many years is extremely valuable, which is what allows us to speak today about climate change in Argentina,” Saul said during the talk “In the conquest of time” offered last week at the C3 together with the historian Felipe Pigna.
Is that of the 125 meteorological stations that make up the National Network, 50 stations are more than 100 years old and 11 are also secularthat is, they perform measurements uninterruptedly since their creation.
“Initially they observed the state of the weather but forecasts were not yet made: it will be necessary to wait until 1904 to establish that the estimation of a future state is a feasible problem to be tackled if one knows the initial state of the atmospheric system and the physical rules that govern it. their behavior,” he said.
Its expansion through the Argentine territory
The year after its foundation, OMA already has a national network with stations in Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Corrientes, Río Negro, Salta, San Juan, Santiago del Estero and Tucumán.
In these early years, the role of two “strategic partners” -the national schools and the railway network- that “it is a pity that we have not been able to sustain” or replace it with “other social actors” in a process of “appropriation” of the service by the community.
“Gould relies on the national colleges – which were distributed throughout the country – so as not to have to create its own system of observatories,” he said.
“All that sustained work over many years is extremely valuable, which is what allows us to speak today about climate change in Argentina”
For Saulo, it should be “very motivating” for teachers and students to have weather stations working inside their buildings and “today we would love for all schools to be involved in measuring time to engage more actively in a sustainable planet.”
Secondly, In 1887, a collaboration agreement was signed between the OMA and the railway companies for the installation and operation of a pluviometric network.
“The railways provided a fundamental function that was to measure rain and we came to have more than two thousand observation points, but with privatization that is lost,” he said.
The first letter of time
As a result of the systematization of this coordinated and networked work, In 1902, the OMA published the first weather chart for all of South America: It consisted of a map of the furrowed by isobars and isotherms, that is, by lines of pressure and constant temperatures.
An important milestone in the history of the current SMN (which acquired its definitive name in 1945) was the adoption of its first Antarctic station in 1904: it is the South Orkney Observatory created at the request of the Irish expeditionary William Bruce who founded it in one of his attempts to reach the pole but later transfers it to the Argentine state.
Currently, The SMN has six Antarctic stations from where important contributions are made to international scientific activity.
As for the forecastsSaul explained that the first ones “go back to the 1940s” but those first letters were made “using manual techniques” that made it possible to predict what the weather might be like the next day based on the evolution of the day’s parameters.
“The data processing center had a kind of computers that were actually more like simple teletypes that were insufficient to solve the numerical forecasts,” he said.
The greatest dream yet to come true is to have an Argentine or Latin American meteorological satellite that allows “uniting the great country” in the task of satellite observation, “which today is covered, but by an American satellite.”
Globally, this “is achieved well into the 1950s” with the first general purpose electronic computers, that is, “when a technology appears that allows the necessary equations to be solved”.
And although Argentina acquired its first computer for scientific purposes in 1960 -the famous Clementina of the UBA-, by the time “that fatal blow to science” was produced, which was the Night of the Long Canes and the almost immediate intervention of the SMN, the organization “had not managed to compare a computer and would not do so until the early 1990s, almost 30 years after the developed countries”, the product of the beginning of a dark period for science.
During the period of military intervention who survived the democratic restoration of 1983 by 24 years, “The disconnection was brutal” between the knowledge produced by the universities and research centers, and the course of the SMN.
“In 1966 the SMN had 2,000 employees and in 2003 it had 1,200, of which only 37 had a degree. What happened is that all the personnel who made the observations were replaced by soldiers, it is the way they found to sustain that task even though the network dropped noticeably,” he said during the talk at C3.
By decision of then President Néstor Kirchner, the SMN returned to having a non-military direction in 2007 and came under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Production. of the Ministry of Defense.
Current forecasts
Since 2018, “The forecast extends up to seven days and allows the population to be warned of severe events up to three days in advance” to which is added from 2020 the incorporation of the “new early warning system”.
“An important pending issue is to modernize the network of observation stations, but what we have achieved is to renew the computer infrastructure with the acquisition of specific supercomputers for the function they perform, which once again places us very well on a global level in the execution of forecast. If we add to that the satellite information and the network of 15 radars, there is a technological leap that Argentina was able to make,” said Saulo.
The greatest dream yet to come true is to have an Argentine or Latin American meteorological satellite that allows “uniting the great homeland” in the task of satellite observation, “which today is covered, but by an American satellite”.
