Many scholars have emphasized the strong link between military interest and meteorology in the 19th and 20th century (e. g. Fleming 1990, Friedman 1994, Harper 2006, 2008). In the second half of the 20th century, atmospheric pollution and environmental interests became a new influential driver of meteorological and related research efforts (Miller, Edwards 2001).
Greenland represented a big landmass of significant interest for the weather services as well as for climatologists. Situated between Europe and America, meteorological stations in Greenland were a crucial link for the extension and completion of the meteorological networks. Weather data from Greenland were of prime importance for European weather forecasting services as well as for aviation or military missiles.
The first meteorological stations were established in 1873 by the Danish Meteorological Institute. By 1939 16 stations were in operation, 14 at the west, only 2 at the east coast (Petersen 1948). In World War II, after the German occupation of Denmark in 1940, the United States invoked the Monroe Doctrine for Greenland and established military bases and meteorological stations (Kimball 1994, p.112-114). One of these meteorological stations was Thule in North Greenland, opened in 1943 by the U.S. Army and expanded in 1951 into a major U.S. Air Force base. After the war, Denmark took over the meteorological stations established by the USA during the war, but the U.S. military continued to expand its own line of meteorological research at Thule Air Base, covering e.g. studies on reduced visibility (white out) and snow storms (Taagholt 2002). Until 1954 a meteorology inspector under the Danish Ministry of Greenland was responsible for running the stations. In December 1954 the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) took over responsibility (DMI 1972). In fact, a lively Danish-American cooperation continued through out the Cold War as can be seen from the fact that the DMI according to one source received a total of 23 military research contracts and grants from U.S. military sources in the period from 1955 to 1977 (Wilkes & Øberg 1982).
Greenland is very sensitive to climatologic processes and experienced a strong warming period between about 1920 and 1945, much stronger than in other regions (Scherhag 1936, Ahlmann 1951). This warming caused considerable concern among meteorologists and climatologists. The Pentagon considered climate change already in in 1947. Carl Gustav Rossby convinced the military planners about the strategic implications of polar melting and the value of studying the polar climate variation. A 1949 directive called for new research into “snow, ice and permafrost; trafficability of soils and slopes; mapping and charting; weather analysis and climatology; and geophysical aspects of communications and navigation.” (Doel 2009).
Since the late 1950s, new hemispheric computer-based numerical weather and climate models provoked a new impulse for meteorological and climatologic research in Greenland. Data from Greenland were essential for running such models, and Greenland hence occupied a strategic geographic location (Harper 2008, 234). 1n 1963 the World Weather Watch and in 1967 the Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP) were established as coordinated efforts to gather climatologic data. In 1978-1980 the $ 500 million Global Weather Experiment took place in the framework of GARP (Fleming et al. 1979). US and Danish research activities in Greenland were integrated in these efforts. While US scientists pioneered weather and climate simulation from the very beginning, the Danish Meteorological Institute specialized in the development and application of regional weather and climate modelling since the early 1980s (Jørgensen & Jørgensen 1992).
Meteorological and climatologic research in Greenland was of decisive military, but also of economic and environmental interest. The project will focus on questions like the following: Which meteorological and climatologic research efforts have been pursued in Greenland in the Cold War era? How instrumental were the interests of the US military forces and how did they relate to Danish military, colonial, economic and scientific interests? What impact on established research efforts did the rise of environmentalism and the increased interest in phenomena like air pollution and climate change have? To what extent did shifts of interest (e. g. environmentalism) or the emergence of new technologies (like satellites and remote sensing) change characteristics or focus of meteorological and climatologic research in Greenland?
