This text was posted
with EUMETSAT's
knowledge
and consent.
A high quality
French translation
is available
in print form
from EUMETSAT.
The IGO monitors
weather and climate
change.
|
Go to the next text page.
Go to the previous text page.
page 35
floor over an indoor swimming pool in the town house which served then as the headquarters. Builders ripping out the bathroom suite in what was to become the accountant's office would have added to the racket.
It was amid chaos that the pattern for what EUMETSAT is today developed. The time was apt for a debate about the future of satellite meteorology in Europe. The MOP was funded only until 1995, and no decision had yet been taken about what would follow. In the same year, the USA planned to reduce its support for polar orbiting satellites. Given the lead-time of space projects, decisions needed to be taken soon about the space segments of both types of orbit if data continuity was to be maintained.
Hence the plan called for EUMETSAT to reach a consensus quickly.
Once equipped with the common goals of such a consensus, the delegates would be able to steer EUMETSAT, as the plan said, in a direction "of maximum benefit to the meteorological community". What this means is that EUMETSAT wanted ESA to develop satellite systems that National Meteorological Services would consider affordable. Luckily, the preliminary work for both geostationary and polar orbiting meteorological satellites was at a sufficiently early stage in 1987 that EUMETSAT would be able, if it chose, to make a marked impact on developments.
There was little doubt at the time that the satellite development would be under the auspices of ESA. As part of its Earth Observation Preparatory Programme, studies of satellites and instruments for meteorology from both geostationary and polar orbit were already under way. The outcome of the Agency's work was to be presented to its ruling Council scheduled to meet at ministerial level in November of that year. If EUMETSAT wanted to influence the Agency's spending plans it needed to act quickly.
The most urgent issue facing the Council was the question of what satellite technology should follow on from the MOP, because plans for geostationary meteorological satellites were further advanced than for polar orbiters. The geostationary satellite's instrumentation was primarily for meteorology, which meant, as the plan pointed out, that "there were few pressures to modify it in such a way that the requirements of the meteorological community are compromised". During their debate delegates recognised the urgency of the situation and at the next Council meeting they passed a Resolution on "The Preparation of a Meteosat Second Generation".
The situation concerning observations from polar orbit was equally urgent, but it was more complex.
The urgency stemmed from the fact that after more than two decades of providing two polar orbiting weather satellites and making their data freely available, the USA had asked the international community to take up some of the financial burden of meteorological observation from polar orbit (see chapter 7). European meteorologists accepted the moral rightness of that request.
The complexity arose because in the Spring of 1987 the most likely scenario was that any operational meteorological package would have to fly on the massive polar platform that would
|