Météo-France

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

METEO-FRANCE is a French public establishment, tasked with the forecasting and study of weather in France. It is also responsible for the issue of weather warnings in France.

The organisation was established by decree in June 1993 and is a department of the Ministry of Transportation. It is headquartered in Paris but many domestic operations have been decentralised to Toulouse. Its budget of around €300 million is funded by state grants, aeronautic royalties and sale of commercial services.

Météo-France has a particularly strong international presence, and is the french representative at the World Meteorological Organization. The organisation is a leading member of EUMETSAT, responsible for the procurement of Meteosat weather satellites.

In addition to its operations in metropolitan France, the agency provides forecasts and warnings for the French overseas départments and collectivities. It has four sub-divisions based in Guadeloupe (with further divisions serving Martinique and French Guiana), New Caledonia, French Polynesia and Réunion. Some of these sub-divisions have particularly important international responsibilities:

For example the French Guiana office based at Cayenne-Rochambeau airport maintains facilities at the ESA/CNES Centre Spatial Guyanais spaceport in Kourou which assists with launch campaigns of the Ariane rocket.
The Réunion sub-division is the official World Meteorological Organisation designated Regional Specialized Meteorological Centre for the provision of forecasts and warnings of tropical cyclones in the south-west Indian Ocean.
The French Polynesia sub-division, whilst not the official RSMC for tropical cyclones in the South Pacific, has been mandated by the WMO to issue forecasts and warnings of tropical cyclones for the neighbouring British Pitcairn Islands.

[edit] About the orthography

Although the original name of the organization was "Météo-France", with acute accents and normal French capitalization, all the publications made by METEO-FRANCE are now using the name written with capitals only, and so without any accents, everywhere the name is used as a trademark for the products and services delivered by the national organization.

This trademark decision reflects the need to have is name not altered in electronic documents due to transcoding errors, and to allow easier international references in many languages, including when referencing the organization itself (in copyright notices for example, or when citing sources).

The name in capitals or with normal capitalization with accents is protected internationally under trademark law, and as a organization name. Some non-binding information documents sometime forget the hyphen in the name (but the hyphen is normally required).