 The Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command traces its ancestry to the Depot of Charts and Instruments, a 19th-century repository for nautical charts and navigational equipment.In the 1840s, its superintendent, Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury, created and published a revolutionary series of ocean current and wind charts.This information, still resident in modern computer models of the ocean basins and atmosphere, laid the foundation for the sciences of oceanography and meteorology.