have matured in the bureaucratic womb, in many queer and unusual 

 shapes and forms, -until, in July I967, the Secretary of the Wavy 

 established the Naval Weather Service Command with a mission: "To 

 provide meteorological services in support of sub-siorface, surface, 

 and air operations of the Navy, and to provide oceanographic fore- 

 casts of the Armed Forces in support of military plans and operations. 



This mission sounds simple, but it conceals a support service of 

 tremendous complexity. The NaAry is nearly 200 years old, and never 

 have its problems been so complicated. It maintains fleets around 

 the world. It must be capable of landing an amphibious force at 

 any point in the world on short notice. The enemy submarine threat 

 grows by the day. Polaris submarines must be maintained on-station 

 half a world away from our shores. Every Fleet job, and there are 

 many more than those mentioned, requires environmental support. It 

 is hard to find any environmental parameter which does not affect 

 Naval operations, often to the degree of creating a no-go situation. 

 These parameters include those \ander the ocean surface such as tem- 

 perature, layer depth, sound propagation; at the surface, those 

 such as sea state, tides, currents, surf, icej and finally, in the 

 atmosphere, density, wind, icing, stability, contrails, refractive 

 index. The requirement to forecast such a wide variety of parameters 

 and do it on a world-wide basis (Fig. 2) makes the Naval Weather 

 Service unique in its complex forecasting responsibilities. 



How are we organized to do the work I have just outlined? We 

 are a line organization, stemming from the Naval Weather Service 

 Command, headquartered in Washington, D.C. Four Fleet Weather 

 Centrals -- Guam, Pearl Harbor, Norfolk, and Rota -- have huge areas 

 ff responsibility (Fig. 2), within which they perform the functions 

 of data collection, computer processing, and dissemination of analy- 

 ses, forecasts, and warnings. A fifth Weather Central is located in 

 Alameda . 



Within the Weather Centrals' areas of responsibility are ten 

 Fleet Weather Facilities, located at Yokosuka, Sangley Point, Kodiak, 

 Quonset Point, San Diego, Pensacola, Jacksonville, Suitland, Keflavik, 

 and London. The Fleet Weather Facilities assist the Weather Centrals 

 in accomplishing their missions, and, in most cases, have a special- 

 ized f\mction. For example, Suitland has forecasting responsibility 

 for the entire Arctic Basin, Kodiak concentrates on ice forecasting 

 (Fig. 3)5 Alameda is heavily engaged in Optimum Track Ship Routing 

 (Fig. k) , Keflavik and Quonset Point provide detailed support for 

 antisubmarine warfare aircraft operations (Fig. 5) and Jacksonville 

 deals with hurricanes (Fig. 6). 



Naval Weather Service Environmental Detachments are assigned to 

 each of the Fleet Weather Centrals and Fleet Weather Facilities. The 

 primary function of these 53 detachments is to support aviation 

 operations. 



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