Società Meteorologica Italiana
The Società Meteorologica Italiana (SMI) is an Italian specialist society that brings together meteorologists and people interested in meteorology . The "Italian Meteorological Society" also deals with climatology and glaciology . The non-profit organization is based in Moncalieri near Turin .
history
The history of the society goes back to the scientific work of the Barnabite Father Francesco Denza . Denza teacher and friend Angelo Secchi had in 1855 in the Papal States between Rome , Ancona and Ferrara organizes a daily telegraphic exchange of weather information and so the impetus for the establishment of a weather service given. Originally from Naples , Denza became a teacher at the Barnabite College in Moncalieri at the end of 1856, where he set up a weather station in 1859 ("Osservatorio Meteorologico"). He exchanged his data with the private weather stations in Alessandria , Aosta , Bra , Ivrea , Mondovì , Pinerolo and Turin located in Piedmont and the Aosta Valley . After the unification of Italy in 1861, he suggested the establishment of further (initially private) weather stations. Denza published his data and studies in the journal Bullettino Meteorologico dell'Osservatorio del Real Collegio Carlo Alberto in Moncalieri, which he founded at the end of 1865 . Because of the founding of the Bullettino and the Corrispondenza Meteorologica Italiana, 1865 is considered to be the year the Società Meteorologica Italiana was founded . Denza had followed his role model Angelo Secchi, who had published the Bollettino Meteorologico dell'Osservatorio del Collegio Romano since 1862 . From 1876 Secchi's observatory on the Roman Palazzo del Collegio Romano was transformed into today's Italian Weather Service , an organizational unit of the Italian Air Force.
At the beginning of September 1880, a joint general meeting of the Corrispondenza Meteorologica Italiana and the Club Alpino Italiano took place in Turin , at which the Associazione Meteorologica Italiana was founded, in which the previous Corrispondenza network was merged. On this occasion, Denza's weather station in Moncalieri was declared the Association's “Central Meteorological Observatory” and the 186 other weather stations and other smaller weather stations were subordinated to it. Data and studies were published in the Bollettino Mensuale ("monthly bulletin "; this is the name the specialist journal Denzas had now adopted). In 1883 the association adopted the name Società Meteorologica Italiana .
From the 1880s it became apparent that the financially better equipped state weather service would gradually take over the previous role of the Meteorological Society. The company did not stand in the way of this development and initially loaned 70 meteorological stations to the “Royal Central Meteorological Office”, which made a significant contribution to its development. With the support of the Salesians of Don Bosco , the Società Meteorologica Italiana set up some weather stations in South America in those years , including in Punta Arenas in 1887 , at the time the southernmost weather station in the world.
Francesco Denza, who suffered a first stroke in 1886 , left Moncalieri in 1890 to lead the reconstruction of the Vatican Observatory in Rome, which he had proposed . This began the slow decline of the company, the dissolution of which could only be prevented with great difficulty after Denza's death in 1894. Several hundred weather stations and stations of the company went entirely to the state weather service and what was then Servizio Idrografico Italiano . The Society's trade journal only appeared irregularly and in reduced form until 1930 and was then taken over by the journal La Meteorologia Pratica of the Benedictine Bernardo Paoloni. From 1939 to 1943 the Rivista di Meteorologia was published. The Second World War led to the dissolution of the company in 1943.
On June 8, 1993, the Società Meteorologica Subalpina was founded in Turin , which saw itself in the successor of Francesco Denzas Corrispondenza Meteorologica . At the same time, the specialist journal Nimbus was founded . On the initiative of the Società Meteorologica Subalpina , the Società Meteorologica Italiana was re-established on November 6, 2000 . The Subalpina declared itself within the national society to be the regional section for north-west Italy. The long period of inactivity and the de facto monopoly of the weather service of the Italian Air Force had meant that Italian meteorology was no longer adequately represented at international level. Thanks to various initiatives, smaller societies emerged, or other societies also covered meteorology. These include the Unione Meteorologica del Friuli Venezia Giulia , the Società Italiana di Meteorologia Applicata (SIMA), the Associazione Italiana di Agrometeorologia and the Associazione Geofisica Italiana (AGI), which, like the Società Meteorologica Italiana, became members of the European Meteorological Society , in which normally only one national meteorological society is represented at a time. The umbrella organization Unione Italiana di Meteorologia (UNIMet), to which the Società Meteorologica Italiana belongs , was created to improve representation at international level .