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The Head of the World Meteorological Organization
Tue Aug 17, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. Recently, I had the chance to sit down
with Michel Jarraud, new Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization.
Jarraud says that the main job of the WMO is coordination.
JARRAUD: Well, in a sense WMO is a big weather service, building on the National
Weather Services of all its member states so, in USA, this is building on all the
activities of NOAA and, in particular, the National Weather Service. But in every
member country of WMO there is a national MET service and the role of WMO is to
make sure is that all these met services cooperate with each other.
I’m thinking most of the developing countries and even more so of the least people of
them to do their job properly so that they can provide proper advice to their society.
BRYAN: A lot of those developing countries are in places that get hit with pretty major
natural disasters, as well, so risk management is a – as you mentioned – a pretty
important part of what the WMO is all about?
JARRAUD: The national disasters affect all countries but the burden falls much more
heavily in terms of human toll on developing countries. The economic impact will affect
also very much the people of the country but if you take, for example, some recent
disasters such the cyclone Mitch, the floods in Mozambique... they could wipe out up to
15-20% of the GDP of some of our member states. So it really affects the development
backwards by many years. So WMO can help – well does help – but can help even
more in minimizing the impact of such disasters.
We will continue with Michel Jarraud tomorrow. Our show is funded by Subaru of
America and the National Science Foundation.
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