Meteorology, Meteorological, History

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HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p30.

HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p28.

p29.

and would take too long to negotiate. For these reasons, the favoured solution was to make maximum use of existing bodies, in particular the WMO and ESA.

By the Spring of 1978 the allocation of organisational responsibilities emerging was that ESA would control the space segment, and either the Agency or a National Meteorological Service would control the ground segment and report to the WMO. This plan was short-lived. Relationships between ESA and the meteorological services were deteriorating. Krige quotes Roy Gibson, the Agency's Director-General, writing in a letter to Andre Lebeau, Director of Future Programmes and Planning, that the Directors of the meteorological services dreamt of severing ties.

The difficulties were associated with the ground segment's performance. Yet some problems were inevitable because much of the science and technology of satellite meteorology was itself still pioneering. ESA had also deliberately chosen a European bid for the ground segment computer rather than a proposal from an experienced US firm because the Agency wanted to promote European industry.

Although there were arguably good reasons for the difficulties with the ground segment, the consequence was that when the heads of the meteorological services met in mid-1980 they were unwilling to endorse plans for working with the WMO and ESA. Instead they set up two new groups of their own to evaluate proposals for managing operational satellite meteorology. One examined potential legal structures and a second, headed by Andre Piaget of the Swiss Meteorological Institute, considered relations between a new structure (by now being called EUMETSAT) and ESA.

Lebeau, who later became Vice-Chairman and then Chairman of the EUMETSAT Council, regarded establishment of the Piaget group as a way to heal wounds. He suggested to the group in January 1979 that the Agency could operate the MOP on EUMETSATs behalf on a non-profit-making basis, with EUMETSAT defining the boundaries. The Agency's Executive further suggested that it could also seek Council approval for research and development. The meteorological services replied that they wanted a system of proven Meteosats without an experimental component. The need to remove as much risk as possible from the proposed meteorological satellites was demonstrated in a very practical way in 1979 when the imager on Meteosat-l failed. This failure underlined, perhaps more than uninterrupted success could have done, just how important reliability would be in the coming era of operational satellite meteorology.

For the next year, until January 1980, the debate moved into the political realm whilst alternative legal structures were negotiated and their costs established. National positions emerged. The UK government did not want another international organisation to be established. France wanted EUMETSAT to have a legal personality of its own. While the debate raged, the Agency's Executive sought and received the Meteosat Programme Board's backing to extend operations to support the second pre-operational satellite until mid-1983.

The Executive had also prepared estimates of the cost to completion - 343 MAU at 1979 economic

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