Report #3 by

Chuck Doswell

on my activities as a

Councilor of the

American Meteorological Society


Created: 27 November 1998 Updated: 21 January 1999 - added item about the Severe Weather Symposium

Disclaimer : Everything contained herein is associated with me personally, and has no connection with my former employer [NOAA/ERL/NSSL] or with the AMS. That is, these are my personal observations, opinions, and recommendations and have no official standing or sanction. If you are offended or bothered by any part of this, take it up with me, not with either my organization or the AMS.


If you have not seen them before, I have other writings concerning the AMS at this Website. Please consult my campaign statement for some of this, and you can find my first report from the council meetings here and my second report here.

 

The Council - as of January 1998 Annual Meeting

The Council consists of (see Article VII.1 of the Constitution):

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* Council Members not in attendance at this meeting.

$ Council members about to finish their terms.

# Dr. McPherson's appointment to the position of AMS Executive Director has been approved by the Council; he'll be replacing Dr. Hallgren, a change to take effect in January 1999, I believe.

____________________________________________________

Thus, there are 21 members on the Council (four AMS officers, two past presidents, and 15 Councilors). The Executive Director and the Secretary-Treasurer are appointed by the Council (Article IX of the Constitution), not elected by the membership as a whole; they are ex officio members of the Council, not eligible to vote. Therefore, there are 19 voting members, and so a two-thirds majority is 13 members if all voting members are present at a meeting. A quorum is a simple majority (10) of the voting members.

My Third AMS Council Meeting - Impressions

Attendance at this two-day Council meeting (held at AMS Headquarters on 1-2 October), was marginal. There were four Councilors not present, making us a pretty tight-fit quorum. As is standard practice, also attending (for the purpose of making presentations to the Council, but not eligible to vote) were various Commissioners (in this case, the STAC Commissioner [Rick Rosen], the Publications Commissioner [Wayne Schubert], the Planning Commissioner [Charlie Hosler], the Professional Affairs Commissioner [Ray Ban], and the Commissioner of Education and Human Resources [John Snow]). The minutes, dutifully recorded by Werner Baum, will appear in a future issue (likely in January 1999, although the minutes of the September 1997 meeting have yet to be published!!) of the Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc, suitably sterilized for publication. I actually recommend that you read these minutes. There is information in them, but you can be sure that some of the entries are not so brief as they appear in the minutes! I will state right now that there will be aspects of some of the discussions that (rightfully) will not be in the minutes and will not appear here, either.

As a Council veteran, now, I was prepared for how things actually went. I came away from this meeting feeling just a bit better than at the Council meeting last January in Phoenix. I will detail some of the reasons for this in what follows. This is a feisty Council! I was proud to be a part of this bunch. As before, I am providing an assortment of impressions and informational tidbits, again in no particular order.