Meteorology, Meteorological, History

An IGO
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weather and
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HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p24.

HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p22.

p23.

data processing and of telecommunications infrastructure. Nearly 15 years later EUMETSAT's Member States would revisit this debate, and their answer shaped the Organisation's future.

Krige reports that Stewart's supporting arguments for his view were that a centralised ground segment architecture would avoid wasting the spacecraft's disseminating capabilities, enhance the security and reliability of the system and economise on the operational exploitation costs. Krige writes: "In the face of this pressure, the French capitulated and the ad hoc group decided unanimously in favour of keeping raw satellite and meteorological data processing together centrally."

So what should this centralised product extraction facility do? In May 1972 a group of Directors of the European Meteorological Services, chaired by Herbert Regula, Head of the Central Forecasting Office of the German Weather Service, proposed that the guiding principle of the central meteorological processing centre (by then called the Meteorological Information Extraction Centre - MIEC) should be to perform tasks that were too complex or expensive to duplicate at different national centres. This meant that the MIEC products were to be at a global scale and quantitative (see table 1). The quantitative products would aid image interpretation and, eventually, Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP). The pre-processed data would go to the national centres for them to use as they wished.

The MIEC products were to be: sea surface temperature, wind fields, cloud coverage, cloud top height and a product relating to the radiation balance of the Earth. An indication of the meteorological significance of this set of products is that it is recognisable 30 years later in the specification for Meteosat Second Generation (MSG), despite the evolution in the intervening years of computing, telecommunications, satellite and instrument technology and despite EUMETSAT's extensive reorganisation of its ground segment.

Once this issue was settled, those Member States participating in the project signed an agreement called the Meteosat Arrangement in July 1972. The Arrangement envisaged that the meteorological services and not the space research community would pay for the MIEC. For the next nine months, the ESRO Meteosat Programme Board and the meteorological services wrestled with the practicalities of how to achieve the aim. Krige writes: "No-one quite knew how to administer or to define the common fund [from the meteorological services] that was going to be needed." These difficulties first showed that some mechanism for managing operational satellite meteorology at a European level would eventually be needed. At the time the task of transferring financial responsibility for the MIEC to the meteorological services proved not to be feasible.

Krige reports the circumstances in detail. He says that efforts at this time to persuade the meteorological community to take responsibility for a major component of the ground segment failed. Early in the debate, he says, the Italian delegate had suggested that all of the ground segment should be placed under the responsibility of the National Meteorological Services. Then, writes Krige, "The British delegation ... revised this [Italian view] further
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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.

eChapter| |TOP

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