Meteorology, Meteorological, History

An IGO
monit-
oring
weather and
climate
change

HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p28

HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p24.

p25.

FROM PAGE 23

agreed that data acquisition and pre-processing centres should come under the ESRO budget, but that the exact interfaces between these and the meteorological centres needed to be discussed more fully. That proposal was transformed into a fixed commitment to pay for the MIEC's software in the Meteosat Agreement signed in July 1972 - but that Agreement was revised just nine months later to remove even this task from the shoulders and the budgets of the meteorological community. It was clear by 1973 that it was going to be a long uphill struggle to enrol the meteorological community into an operational meteorological system."

It is true that in 1973 many operational forecasters in field offices were not strong advocates of satellite data. Often the forecasters were not familiar with the data because telecommunications limited the amount of imagery that could be transmitted. Yet satellite imagery itself had grown in sophistication during the late 1960s. By 1973, the satellite imagery available at central facilities showed the geographic position and extent of frontal systems, and meteorologists from these offices regularly transmitted analyses of imagery to field offices, providing local forecasters with more accurate knowledge than previously of the weather coming in their direction. In contrast, the value of satellite observations to computer models predicting the weather was much less clear in 1973 than it is now. Indeed, there were times when satellite data made NWP models less not more accurate. This was mainly due to inaccuracy induced by the conversion of raw satellite data into conventional meteorological parameters such as temperatures.

Given this mixed sense of the value of satellite data to operational meteorology and only partial familiarity with the technology, it seems inevitable that National Meteorological Services could not then commit a significant portion of their budgets for satellite meteorology.

Nevertheless, senior meteorologists in Europe recognised the promise of satellites and knew that eventually the technology would have to be integrated into operational meteorology. As early as the Summer of 1972, whilst ESRO and the meteorological community were struggling to find a way of paying for the MIEC, Raimond Schneider, Chairman of the ad hoc group for Space Meteorology and Director of the Swiss Meteorological Institute⁷, had told the Meteosat Programme Board that the cost of a truly operational satellite would have to be borne by the meteorological services and could well account for about ten per cent of their budgets. Schneider said that the need for this new expenditure from perhaps 1978179 onwards needed bringing to the attention of ministries.

He was, of course, correct because ultimately the European taxpayer would have to pay for satellite meteorology, whether it was run by ESA or some other organisation. Thus it was the chancelleries (sic HG, site editor)and treasuries of Europe, notoriously unsympathetic to new areas of expenditure, which the Agency and the

THE NEXT TEXT PAGE IN THE HARD COPY OF THIS BOOK IS PAGE 28

7 - Now known as MeteoSwiss.

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