Singapore's Weather and Climate Story with the WMO
Every person on Earth is affected by weather and climate. But almost nobody thinks about the UN agency that coordinates how the world monitors and predicts it. The World Meteorological Organization is one of the least famous international organizations out there. Singapore has been working with them since 1966. And the story is more interesting than you might expect.
This is part of my retelling of “50 Years of Singapore and the United Nations” (Tommy Koh, Li Lin Chang, Joanna Koh, 2015, ISBN: 978-9814713030).
Chapter 34 is written by the Meteorological Service Singapore as an institution, not by a single author. It reads like an official history, but it covers some genuinely fascinating stuff: how weather data from Singapore helped solve a scientific mystery, how the haze problem gave Singapore a regional role, and why climate change research in Southeast Asia is so difficult.
Singapore Joins the WMO
Singapore’s connection to global meteorology goes back further than you might think. Even before independence, even before the WMO became a UN agency, the Singapore-based Malayan Meteorological Service was at the table.
The International Meteorological Organization, the WMO’s predecessor, took steps toward integrating with the UN system in 1947. The Malayan Meteorological Service was present at those discussions.
Singapore became a sovereign member of the WMO in 1966. The chapter quotes a statement from the Deputy Prime Minister’s office that explains the logic perfectly: “The importance of meteorological services to air and sea navigation makes it necessary for Singapore, which is at the crossroads of air and sea routes, to be a full Member State of the Organization.”
It was not a question of whether to join. It was how fast.
The World Weather Watch: Weather Has No Borders
In the 1960s, the WMO launched one of its most ambitious ideas. The World Weather Watch. The basic principle was simple but powerful: weather does not respect borders. Every country, no matter how small, should contribute weather observations to a global pool. In return, every country gets access to the full pool.
The chapter calls it “one of the most outstanding examples of international cooperation.” Without it, countries would have to negotiate individual deals with each other just to share basic weather data. The World Weather Watch replaced all of that with a single global system.
And it was not just useful for forecasting. The shared data helped solve actual scientific puzzles.
Singapore’s Data Helped Crack a Scientific Mystery
Here is a detail I really liked. For decades, scientists were confused by a phenomenon they eventually named the “Quasi-Biennial Oscillation.” It is a pattern in the tropical atmosphere.
Data from Singapore and a handful of other tropical locations, shared through the World Weather Watch, helped scientists figure out what was going on. The Quasi-Biennial Oscillation originates in the tropics, but its effects reach far. Some studies suggest it even affects the strength of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean.
The chapter uses this to make a broader point: the whole system is greater than the sum of its parts. Singapore is a tiny country contributing a small amount of data. But that data, combined with observations from everywhere else, leads to discoveries that benefit the entire world.
The Haze Problem Gave Singapore a Regional Role
This is the part of the chapter that will sound familiar to anyone who has lived in Southeast Asia.
In 1985, the WMO proposed that ASEAN should have a “Regional Specialised Meteorological Centre.” The idea was to help the region cooperate and build technical capacity, especially as meteorology was moving from manual methods to computer-based weather modeling.
After years of discussion, the ASEAN Specialised Meteorological Centre (ASMC) was established in Singapore in 1993. At first, it focused on research and weather modeling.
Then the haze hit.
Severe transboundary haze episodes in 1994 and 1997, caused by land and forest fires in the region, gave the ASMC a new mission. It became the center responsible for monitoring and assessing transboundary smoke haze across ASEAN.
That is the role most people in the region know the ASMC for. But the chapter points out that the centre never stopped its original work in regional capacity-building and scientific research. It just got a very visible second job.
Climate Change: Southeast Asia Has a Big Problem
The chapter tackles climate change head-on. The WMO was one of the first organizations to recognize that Earth’s climate was heading in a dangerous direction. In 1979, the WMO’s World Climate Conference raised the alarm. In 1988, together with the UN Environment Programme, the WMO helped create the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The IPCC has become famous for assessing climate science and communicating findings to policymakers. But there is a catch. The IPCC reviews existing research. It does not generate new research.
This is where Southeast Asia has a problem. The region’s tropical weather is surprisingly complicated. Multiple weather and climate systems interact. The geography is a mix of deep seas, shallow seas, deltas, mountains, and islands, all of which affect weather in subtle ways. And the region’s climate research capability is still developing.
The result: there is not enough published research on Southeast Asian climate. The IPCC cannot fill that gap. Scientists from outside the region cannot fill it either. Southeast Asia needs to do this work itself.
Singapore Steps Up on Climate Research
Singapore’s First National Climate Change Study in 2007 made it clear that the country needed a better understanding of the physical science behind climate change and extreme weather. Not just for its own planning, but as a contribution to the region and to the broader scientific community.
In 2013, Singapore established the Centre for Climate Research Singapore. The Centre produces national climate projections tailored for Singapore. It also led the Second National Climate Change Study. And its research connects a community of scientists across local and overseas institutions.
This is one of those investments that sounds boring on paper but matters enormously in practice. If you want to prepare for rising seas, more extreme storms, and changing weather patterns, you need to understand the science first. Singapore decided not to wait for someone else to do that research.
Keeping Planes Safe and Ships Informed
This chapter also covers two practical areas where Singapore’s meteorological work makes a daily difference.
Aviation. Considering how many flights happen every day, weather-related accidents are remarkably rare. That is partly because of close collaboration between national weather services and the aviation sector, coordinated through the WMO and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
Singapore’s Meteorological Service acts as a data hub. It manages regional meteorological data and transmits it to Europe for wider distribution. As one of five special databanks in the Asia-Pacific, it maintains up-to-date weather data for aviation and responds to over a million online queries every year. One million. Every year.
Shipping. More than two-thirds of Earth’s surface is ocean, but weather observations over water are sparse. The WMO runs the Voluntary Observing Ship (VOS) scheme together with the International Oceanographic Commission. Merchant ships are trained to take weather observations while at sea. When those ships come to Singapore, a Port Meteorological Officer meets with them to help with instruments and training.
The data from these ships is used for operational forecasting and for understanding how the oceans affect climate. It is a clever solution to a hard problem: you cannot put weather stations in the middle of the ocean, but you can put weather instruments on the ships that are already there.
Looking Forward
The chapter ends on a forward-looking note. Singapore has made huge progress in 50 years, but the world keeps changing. The Meteorological Service Singapore is working to play a bigger role in the WMO’s regional programs. It is building better data infrastructure to share more and better information.
The message is humble but confident. Singapore has benefited from working with the WMO since the very beginning. It has contributed back in meaningful ways, from solving scientific mysteries with its data to monitoring regional haze to building climate research capacity. And there is more to do.
Weather and climate do not care about national borders. That makes international cooperation not just nice to have, but necessary. Singapore gets that.
About the Author
The Meteorological Service Singapore (MSS) is a division of the National Environment Agency, a Statutory Board of the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources. Its main functions include making, collecting, processing, and exchanging weather observations; providing weather forecasts and data for aviation, shipping, and the public; conducting research to improve its services; compiling Singapore’s climatological records; and participating in international cooperation programs in meteorology.