899 JUNE 2007 AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY | T he Cooperative Observer Program (COOP) was established in the 1890s to make daily meteorological observations across the United States, primarily for agricultural purposes. The COOP network has since become the backbone of temperature and precipitation data that characterize means, trends, and extremes in U.S. climate. COOP data are routinely us...

Recent years have seen much of Australia suffer from severe meteorological drought and a series of climatic extremes (e.g. Bureau of Meteorology 2008a, 2008b). As a result, water resources have widely fallen to record lows, and agricultural production in southern and eastern parts of Australia has been poor with a series of crop failures (e.g. Murray-Darling Basin Commission 2007; Australian Bu...

This article charts the rise and fall of medical meteorology in nineteenth-century Denmark, describing how interest in the subject developed, the optimism that sprang from the possibility of having access to accurate meteorological measurements, and the decline in interest as the data failed to support the medical meteorologists’ claims. Within this framework, I also attempt to place the Danish...