The CCM program is a service for the general public by the AMS. The Society has established high standards of technical competence, character, and experience for certified consultants who provide advice in meteorology to the public. The CCM program was established to ensure that certain individuals have been tested and found to meet or exceed those standards. The certification enables users of meteorological services to select consultants or employees with greater confidence in the quality and reliability of the products or services they will receive. The CCM is also a formal recognition on the part of his or her colleagues, acting through the Society, that an applicant is considered well qualified to carry on the work of a consulting meteorologist.

The purpose of certification in the CCM program is fourfold:

1. To foster the establishment and maintenance of a high level of professional competency and mature and ethical counsel in the field of consulting meteorology;
2. To provide a basis on which a client seeking assistance on problems of a meteorological nature may be assured of mature, competent, and ethical professional counsel;
3. To provide incentive for the continued professional growth (Note: this is a PDF document) of the meteorologist after completion of his or her academic training;
4. To enhance the prestige, authority, success, and emoluments of consulting meteorology specifically, and of professional meteorology generally, by ensuring such a consistently high order of professional activity that unqualified practitioners will either labor to achieve this recognition or retire from the field.

e·mol·u·ment

n.
Payment for an office or employment; compensation.

[Middle English, from Latin molumentum, gain, originally a miller's fee for grinding grain, from molere, to grind out : -, ex-, ex- + molere, to grind; see mel- in Indo-European roots.]