Meteorology, Meteorological, History

An IGO
monit-
oring
weather and
climate
change

HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p64.

HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p62.

p63

continuous flow of temperature and humidity profiles from the geostationary Meteosat series monitoring European and African regions. Then, as now, the attraction of such data was the hope that it would improve the accuracy of the computer models that make weather predictions for days ahead.

Nearly ten years later in November 1992, the EUMETSAT Secretariat introduced a programme proposal for MSG to be undertaken cooperatively with ESA. That proposal was nowhere near as ambitious as the ideas developed in Avignon (see table 4, page 64), but it was more advanced than the first generation of Meteosats and it maintained the aim of providing technology to enhance Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) and short-range weather forecasting.

It is not unusual for the complexity of a mission to be reduced from the ambitions of its initial conceptual phase, and, consequently, the descoping of the design concept for the second generation of Meteosats was natural. But it also occurred because when the mission aims of MSG were originally listed EUMETSAT did not exist. Once EUMETSAT opened its doors for business, the MSG programme became more closely identified with its main user and funding community, that is with the National Meteorological Services. At this time these services and the international meteorological community were increasingly eager to see Europe establish some kind of meteorological activity from polar orbit (see chapter 7). Several of EUMETSAT's Member States argued that reducing the technical complexity of the new series of geostationary satellites would free money for activities in polar orbit. They argued further that, from a technical standpoint, it would be better to perform sounding from polar orbit. This latter assertion proved to be controversial.

EUMETSAT's eventual compromise, a result of trade-offs among questions of weight, cost, complexity and plans for a polar orbit, was that MSG should carry an improved imager from which some information about the vertical structure of the atmosphere could be deduced (see table 4). The satellites are also designed to carry an instrument measuring the distribution of incoming and upwelling radiation from the Earth, which is a data set of deep scientific significance for climate and atmospheric studies. The cost of MSG to EUMETSAT is 1035 Million European Currency Units (MECU) at 1992 economic conditions, including a contribution of 162 MECU towards development of the ESA prototype. The humidity sounder proposed at Avignon will fly instead on the EUMETSAT Polar System (EPS)/Metop.

The process that led EUMETSAT to its policy on MSG began with the Secretariat's presentation of the Long-Term Plan to the fourth Council meeting in April 1987. There were two distinct sets of significant decisions within that process: first, the technical and, secondly, policy-based issues centring around the relationship between ESA and EUMETSAT.

From the beginning it was clear that decisions would fall into these general categories. The Long-Term Plan assumed that EUMETSAT and ESA would cooperate in the development of MSG. What was far from clear was the form that this cooperation would take. The issue proved to

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