ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Data Wars: International Data Sharing (or not) in Meteorology, 1980s-1990s

• In Event: Shifting Narratives in Space Science and Technology (1)

English Abstract

During the 1980s, some national weather services began commercializing part of the meteorological data they collected -especially satellite data. Accordingly, they ceased to supply part of the data to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the United Nations body in charge of weather affairs. These policies created tensions with those weather services committed to the free and unrestricted data exchange -some of them responded in kind and stopped providing their satellite (and other) data too. This escalation of data retaliation, known by the actors as the “Data Wars”, threatened the international system of data sharing encouraged by WMO since its creation in 1950, based on making weather data collected with national resources accessible to all. By the early 1990s, WMOs officers and professional meteorologists feared that the data sharing system would collapse.
In this talk, I look at this turbulent episode to illustrate that, despite common imaginaries of collaboration in meteorology practice, be it for war, finances, trade or other interests, what data is shared, with whom, and under what conditions is something that must be explained historically. Ultimately, I use the history of satellite data sharing to suggest a way of imagining space technology within the tradition of field science practices, discourses, and history, as well as to reflect on the power and limitations of prevalent imaginaries to fully understand the space age and its place in history.

Author

• Gemma - Cirac-Claveras, Institut d'Història de la Ciència - UAB