History
The Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command traces its ancestry to the Depot of Charts and Instruments, a 19th century repository for nautical charts and navigational equipment. In the 1840s, its superintendent, Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury, created and published a revolutionary series of wind and current charts. This information, still resident in modern computer models of Ocean basins and the atmosphere, laid the foundation for the sciences of oceanography and meteorology.
Atmospheric science was further developed with the birth of naval aviation early in the twentieth century. During World War I and the following decades, naval aerological specialists applied the fledgling concepts of air masses and fronts to warfare and provided forecasts to the first transatlantic flight.
The Navy's weather and ocean programs contributed greatly to Allied victory in World War II. In the Pacific, Navy forecasters cracked the Japanese weather code. Hydrographic survey ships, often under enemy fire, collected data along foreign coastlines for the creation of critical navigation charts.
In the mid-1970s, the Navy's meteorology and oceanography programs were integrated in a single organization reflecting nature's close interaction of sea and air. This structure is today the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command.
Read more about this topic: Commander, Naval Meteorology And Oceanography Command
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)