Meteorology, Meteorological, History

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HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p17.

HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p15.

p16

Organisation will soon have satellites in both geostationary and polar orbit as well as a distributed network of facilities mining the data streams from these satellites for novel applications.

EUMETSAT opened its doors for business on 19 June 1986 when delegates of the new Organisation met at the European Space Agency in Paris to select the location of their new headquarters and to appoint their first Director. The meeting was the culmination of sustained and prolonged efforts by officials from ESA, the Agency's Member States and National Meteorological Services to create an intergovernmental organisation to take responsibility for operational space-based meteorology in Europe.

The events that led to the formation of EUMETSAT began when Europe's meteorologists first discussed European weather satellites in the 1960s. Then ESRO, which in 1975 became ESA, took over the development of the Meteosat series of geostationary satellites from France. From the beginning, ESRO hoped that Meteosat would become an operational programme paid for by the meteorological community. The task proved to be difficult, but eventually EUMETSAT was formed. The subject is explored in detail in the ESA history publication (HSR-22, March 1998) entitled, The European Meteorological Sate11ite Programme by John Krige (also incorporated into the ESA publication SP1235, Volume II, published in 2000).

An abbreviated version of Krige's work appears in chapter 1 of this account. Chapter 1 looks also at the critical stages in the early days of satellite meteorology in Europe. Its significance to the history of EUMETSAT is that the memory of some of the early tensions between the meteorological community and ESA lingered on into the early days and it took some time to resolve problems and to lay the ghosts. Yet solving the problems was essential to the future of satellite meteorology in Europe.

One person well qualified to speak on this subject is Andre Lebeau. He is a former President of the French Space Agency (CNES - Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales), former Director of Future Programmes and Planning at ESA, and was Vice-Chairman then Chairman of EUMETSAT's Council during its formative years. At a history conference co-sponsored by ESA and the Science Museum in London, Lebeau told delegates: "These problems, unavoidably, have a background that I would describe in broad terms as a parent-child conflict; desire in the parent organisation to keep the child under constant control, [and a] growing Freudian desire in EUMETSAT to kill its father. This conflict phase, to the best of my knowledge, now belongs to the past and must remain there. Smooth interfacing of ESA and EUMETSAT is a must because - different from the basically commercial EUTELSAT - both organisations rely on the same source of funding, the European taxpayer. Unnecessary duplications are not acceptable."

Lebeau's psychological metaphor gives insight into the early organisational relationship between ESA and EUMETSAT. It is probably most apposite at the level of interpersonal dynamics between key personnel.

At an organisational level the most striking

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
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