Meteorology, Meteorological, History

An IGO
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HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p23.

HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p21.

p22.

Meteorological Service, said in a letter written in December 1970 to Hermann Bondi that he was shocked to see a European project in conflict with a national programme.

Nevertheless, six months later when members of the ad hoc group met in Zurich on 3 June 1971, they concluded that the ideal European system would be a geostationary satellite able to provide cloud cover images in the visible and infrared but that they also wanted a polar orbiter for temperature soundings plus a communications package collecting and relaying meteorological data from ground-based platforms. The really ambitious part of this project was that they also envisaged a space-to-space link to simplify the ground segment. Only the plan for a European geostationary satellite survived at that time.

Some weeks after the ad hoc group had reached this conclusion, the French sent a letter, dated 25 June 1971, to the Chairman of the Council of ESRO proposing the Europeanisation of Meteosat. It is at this point that Stewart, Bizzarri, Pastre and Mohr, with Tessier from ESRO, reviewed Meteosat from a mission standpoint for Europeanisation.

See pages 26-27. Copy of original letter sent from the French Delegation.

There are a number of complicated and disputed reasons that motivated France to propose the Europeanisation of Meteosat, but from the perspective of the history of EUMETSAT, the important point is that the proposal was made and accepted. The meteorological community now needed to evaluate the principles to be embodied in the ground segment.

It was the Autumn of 1971.

In September, engineers from ESRO and the French Space Agency as well as two meteorologists evaluated ground segment architectures. By November, they were ready to recommend a central station to: control the satellite and mission; calibrate the data and assign them to the correct geographical location (preprocessing); and extract an as yet to be defined set of meteorological parameters from the preprocessed data. In addition, they recommended primary and secondary user stations. The former, of the type to be used by National Meteorological Services, would be designed to receive all the available processed digital data. Secondary stations would be simpler and receive less information.

when the ad hoc group debated the concept, the important question to be decided was where would the function of meteorological product extraction be located? The main questions in 1971 were: to what extent was it technically feasible to separate pre-processing and processing (extraction of meteorological information), and was it economically and technically better to perform the tasks centrally or to distribute them to National Meteorological Services?

The French delegation argued that the task of meteorological product extraction could be undertaken separately from the satellite control and preprocessing. The UK and Germany preferred a centralised ground segment architecture that kept meteorological product extraction and pre-processing together. This seems at the time to have been a technical as much as a political debate that took account of the state-of-the-art of computing, of algorithms for satellite

SEE ALSO| |

1. Meteorologists shed political shackles, a review of Declan Murphy's history of the first 25 years of EUMETSAT (2011), by Helen Gavaghan.

2. An interview in 2010 with Dr Tillman Mohr, a special advisor to the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organisation, in Science, People & Politics.

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Contents

Preface

Foreword

Introduction

Ch.1

Ch.2

Ch.3

Ch.4

Ch.5

Ch.6

Ch.7

Ch.8

The History of EUMETSAT is available in English and French from EUMETSAT©.
First printed 2001. ISBN 92-9110-040-4

Eumetsat meteorology meteorological artificial satellites
European Space Agency weather climate policy politics history