About Chinese Meteorological Society

Chinese Meteorological Society

The Chinese Meteorological Society (中国气象学会, CMS) is China's national learned society for the atmospheric sciences, and one of the oldest scientific societies in the country to have survived, in recognisable continuity, into the present day. It was founded on 10 October 1924 at the Jiao'ao Observatory — rendered in older sources as the Jiaoshi or Kiaochow Observatory — in Qingdao, Shandong, and it marked its centenary in the same city in November 2024. The Society is affiliated with the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) and is based in Beijing, alongside the campus of the China Meteorological Administration. An academic, non-profit organisation, it was described in a publisher's account of its journal partnership as having more than 20,000 individual members and 133 corporate members, and as offering a forum for the exchange of ideas, information and experience among everyone with a professional interest in atmospheric science and technology. Its Chinese name, its founding date and its Qingdao birthplace together form the core of its identity: this is the professional home of the community that built modern Chinese meteorology.

Meteorology in China is a discipline with unusually direct consequences. A country exposed to typhoons on its south-east coast, to the East Asian monsoon, to drought on the northern plains and to severe convective weather inland needs forecasting, climatology and atmospheric physics as working public services, not only as academic subjects. The Society exists to connect the people who do that work — forecasters, researchers, instrument specialists, teachers and the operational services — across universities, observatories and the meteorological administrations. Its stated founding purpose, as quoted in later histories of Chinese observation, was "to seek the progress of meteorological science and the development of meteorological observation undertakings", a formulation that joins research and observing practice together, and that still describes the Society's twin commitments a century later.

Foundation in Qingdao in 1924

The founding meeting took place on 10 October 1924 at the observatory in Qingdao, then one of the best-equipped observing stations in China. The China Meteorological Administration's centenary photo history records the date and place plainly: "On October 10, 1924, CMS was founded at the Jiao'ao Observatory in Qingdao, Shandong, China." Among those who helped to found the Society was Zhu Kezhen (1890–1974), known in English as Coching Chu, who had taken his doctorate in meteorology at Harvard University in 1918 and had returned to teach at Nanjing, where he trained China's first generation of modern meteorologists and geographers. Zhu is regarded as a founder of modern meteorology and geography in China, and biographical records credit him as a first director of the Society in 1924 and, repeatedly from 1929 onwards, as its president. The Society he helped to create belonged to the first wave of Chinese disciplinary societies, founded in the same reforming decades that produced the country's modern universities, its Academia Sinica and its first national observing networks.

The early Society was small by modern standards but active. A group photograph of the representatives of its seventh session, taken in 1931, survives in the centenary record, evidence of regular national meetings within its first decade. Its members were the staff of a still-thin observing network and the teachers of a new subject, and the Society gave them a shared professional forum at a time when Chinese meteorology was being built almost from first principles.

A journal from 1925: Acta Meteorologica Sinica

Publishing began almost immediately. The Society's journal started publication in 1925, a year after the founding, and that journal is the ancestor of today's Acta Meteorologica Sinica, the Society's flagship title. The centenary of the journal itself was marked in 2024 and 2025, with Springer, the journal's international publisher, assembling a centenary collection under the title "Celebrating 100 Years of the Chinese Meteorological Society's Journal — Acta Meteorologica Sinica". The journal publishes research across all branches of meteorology: pure and applied meteorology, climatology and climate change, marine meteorology, atmospheric physics and chemistry, and cloud physics and weather modification among them.

The journal appears six times a year. From January 2011, under a partnership announced by Springer, Acta Meteorologica Sinica has been published by Springer electronically worldwide and in print outside mainland China, having previously been published by the Society itself; it joined Springer's Chinese Library of Science, a collection of more than ninety Chinese research journals. Alongside the Chinese-language title stands its English-language companion, the Journal of Meteorological Research. The English version of the Society's journal was officially founded in September 1987, and the Journal of Meteorological Research now publishes research advancing the observation, modelling and forecasting of weather and climate; Springer's collection page records a Journal Impact Factor of 3.5 for 2025. Together the two titles carry Chinese atmospheric research to domestic and international readerships respectively, and their combined lineage, running unbroken in concept from 1925, makes publishing one of the Society's most durable functions.

Re-registration and rebuilding after 1949

The Society's modern legal existence dates from the early People's Republic: its registration was approved by the government in June 1951. The post-1949 decades brought the great expansion of China's state meteorological service, and the Society rebuilt its structures alongside it. A documented milestone came in August 1962, when the Society's annual meeting and congress heard an opening speech by its honorary chairman, Zhu Kezhen, and a closing speech by its chairman, Zhao Jiuzhang, and the new council decided to set up four specialised committees: on weather and dynamic meteorology; on atmospheric physics and meteorological instruments; on climate; and on agricultural meteorology. Those four headings — forecasting dynamics, physics and instruments, climate, and applied agricultural work — map remarkably well onto the discipline's enduring divisions.

International contact resumed as China reopened. In October 1975 a delegation of the Society led by its vice-president Zhou Jingmeng was invited to visit the United States and related meteorological organisations, an early instance of the foreign exchange that would later become routine. The Society's senior figures remained woven into national science leadership: Zhu Kezhen, its founding figure, served after 1949 as a vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and as president of both the meteorological and geographical societies.

Committees and the organisation of a discipline

The committee system begun in 1962 grew into the Society's principal way of organising specialist life. In its modern form the Society organises specialist committees spanning weather forecasting, climate, atmospheric physics and applied meteorology, together with the many sub-fields those headings contain, and it convenes the discipline's national congresses and specialist symposia. Committee formation has continued into the Society's second century: at the centenary forum held in Qingdao on 23 November 2024, under the title "Looking back on a century of history and looking forward to a new journey", the inauguration ceremony of the 29th Council's Meteorological History and Records Professional Committee was launched, a sign that the Society now treats its own history as a scholarly subject in its own right.

Structurally, the Society belongs to the standard Chinese learned-society model: a national, CAST-affiliated academic organisation, headquartered in Beijing, drawing its membership from the meteorological services, the Chinese Academy of Sciences institutes, universities and related industries, and working through councils, committees and local activity. Its seat alongside the China Meteorological Administration campus in Beijing reflects how closely the learned society and the operational service have always been intertwined in China: many of the same people forecast, research and organise the profession.

Science popularisation and Meteorological Knowledge

Popularisation is not an afterthought for this Society; it is one of its documented founding-era functions, and it acquired its own magazine in 1981, when Meteorological Knowledge was founded. The China Meteorological Administration's centenary account describes it as, at its founding, the only journal using colour photography to popularise meteorological science knowledge in China, and notes that it continues to this day. A weather-literate public is a safety asset in a typhoon- and flood-exposed country, and the Society's popular work — the magazine, public lectures and disaster-prevention education — addresses awareness of weather hazards and of climate change directly.

That strand of work was given its own centenary volume in 2024, the Commemorative Collection for the Centennial of Meteorological Science Popularization, composed of popular-science articles intended, in the publisher's summary, to encourage more scientists to write popular science and to raise the public's awareness and capacity to prevent and mitigate disasters and respond to climate change. Few learned societies anywhere can point to a hundred-year popularisation record documented as a subject of celebration in its own right.

The centenary of 2024

The Society celebrated its hundredth anniversary in Qingdao in November 2024, returning to its founding city. On 23 November three books were released: The Centennial History of the Chinese Meteorological Society (1924–2024); a Commemorative Collection on a Century of Advances in Atmospheric Research and Application; and the popularisation collection described above. The China Meteorological Administration reported that the centennial history "covers details about the development of CMS over the past century since its establishment" and is "an important reference for studying the history of China's meteorological development and meteorological scientific societies", while the series as a whole was said to have "left a colorful record of the development of China's meteorological career and built a new bridge for the dissemination of meteorological science and cultural inheritance".

The accompanying centenary forum and photo exhibition reviewed the Society's course in three broad eras — the pre-1949 establishment years, the new developments of 1950 to 1978, and the reform-era expansion that followed — using group photographs, meeting records and publication milestones. A centenary is also an act of record-keeping, and the Society used its own to fix dates, names and images in published form for the next century of historians.

International links

The Society links China's meteorological services and universities with the World Meteorological Organization community, and its international courtesies are documented. In 2006 the Society conferred honorary membership on Michel Jarraud, then Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization. Its journals' international publishing arrangements, its delegations abroad since the 1970s and its reception of foreign counterparts make it the natural first point of professional contact for overseas meteorologists dealing with China. Its senior founders were international figures in their own right: Zhu Kezhen, for example, was selected in 1946 as a member of the climatology committee of the international meteorological organisation of his day and attended the founding conference of UNESCO as a member of the Chinese delegation.

Why the Society matters

The Chinese Meteorological Society matters for three verifiable reasons. First, longevity: founded in 1924 and continuously existing since, it is among the oldest scientific societies in China, with a documented centenary and a published hundred-year history. Second, infrastructure: through Acta Meteorologica Sinica, the Journal of Meteorological Research and Meteorological Knowledge, it operates the publication ladder of an entire discipline, from frontier research in two languages to colour-illustrated public education. Third, professional integration: its committees, congresses and Beijing base bind together the operational forecast services, the universities and the research institutes of the world's largest meteorological community. For anyone recording China's scientific institutions, the essentials are the founding at Qingdao's Jiao'ao Observatory on 10 October 1924, the journal lineage from 1925, the re-registration of June 1951, the CAST affiliation, and the centenary celebrated in Qingdao in November 2024.