The 14 WS collects, protects and exploits authoritative climate data to optimize military and intelligence operations and planning in order to maximize the combat effectiveness of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) personnel and weapons systems.

The mission of the 14 WS is to collect, protect and exploit authoritative climate data to optimize military and intelligence operations and planning.

Punched cards, which are pieces of stiff paper that contain digital information represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions, were a technical marvel when they came into prominence in the United States.

The Army Air Forces Weather Research Center's Climatological Section was born at Bolling Field on 10 September 1941, one week after the U.S. Destroyer Greer was attacked by a German submarine off the coast of Iceland.

Because of the urgent need for climatic information, early in 1942 the WPA civilian punched card project was transformed into a support resource for the Armed Forces.

Throughout World War II, the AAF Weather Service maintained a Climatology Division with its staff at Headquarters U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) in the Pentagon.

The same year the AAF Statistical Services Division was created at Winston-Salem, North Carolina to begin the routine storage and processing of military weather observations.

The planning for every landing, mission, and offensive, including the D-Day Invasion in 1944 and the atomic bombing of Japan, required extensive climatological preparation and analyses.

Although demobilization cut deeply into the Air Weather Service's wartime strength of nearly 19,000, the importance of climatology and its applications continued to be recognized.

This unit was a joint Weather Bureau, Air Force, and Navy climate center established after the war to unify U.S. civilian and military records, observing methods, and data management procedures.

After the war, many punched card collections that were acquired from our allies or captured from our enemies were sent to New Orleans for processing (one set weighed 21 tons).

The "Kopenhagener Schlussel" deck of 7 million captured German punched cards contained weather observations taken during WWII in Europe and the Middle East.

On 18 December 1957 the AWS merged the Climatic Analysis Division and the Data Integration Branch with Detachment 3 in spaces at Suitland, Maryland formerly occupied by the USAF Weather Central.

On 1 April 1959, Detachment 3 (the Climatic Center) moved from Suitland to the Washington Navy Yard (Annex 2, at 225 D. Street, Southeast) on the Potomac River.

At this time, IBM electronic accounting equipment installed at the Climatic Center allowed data processing directly from punched card to tape.

The Climatic Center, USAF became a "named activity" but remained within the 2150th Air Weather Squadron, which assumed control of Detachment 3's operating location (the Data Processing Division) at Asheville.

The move, which took 13 months and put USAFETAC's project commitments about 2 years behind schedule, was declared complete on 31 October 1975 when the new PDP 11/45 and IBM 360/45 computers became operational.

By the end of the decade, the demand for climatological services remained extremely high, with the project backlog at nearly fifty thousand man-hours.

To better reflect the changing mission of the unit, USAFETAC was renamed the Air Force Combat Climatology Center (AFCCC) on 1 October 1995.

This move was completed on 1 July 1998, with the unit transferring its flag to the Federal Building Complex alongside the National Climatic Data Center.

Today's military climatologists and analysts continue to fulfill customer requests similar to those of their predecessors as long as 60 years ago, but with improved techniques and equipment.

In addition, the unit launched its inaugural Geographic Information System (GIS) capability to display applied Geospatial Climatology.

In January 2014, the 14WS began a more robust climate prediction and seasonal outlook capability to meet additional DoD and Intelligence Community requirements.