Meteorology, Meteorological, History

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HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p53.

HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p51.

p52.

EUMETSAT Polar System (EPS), the Director had prepared a request for an additional 24 staff, which he submitted to the same meeting. The need for the staff was obvious and not really disputed, but it brought to a head a simmering question about the long-term role that EUMETSAT intended to play in the definition, development, procurement and management of meteorological satellites and their ground segments. By the end of the thirteenth Council meeting, delegates decided to approve 20 new posts, but told the Secretariat that recommendations on future staffing levels would have to be tentative, pending a comprehensive assessment of EUMETSAT's role in both space and ground segment activities.

The review began immediately, and by the time of the fifteenth Council meeting in June 1991, the Secretariat had prepared a strategy document for discussion, entitled EUMETSAT's Long-Term Management Policy. This document essentially revisited the question first asked during discussions about the Long-Term Plan in 1987: How should EUMETSAT fulfil its task to "establish, maintain and exploit European systems of operational meteorological satellites"?

Just as in April 1987 when the Director presented the Long-Term Plan to the Council, the big question concerned EUMETSAT's relationship with ESA. In 1987 there was no realistic alternative than for ESA to design and operate the satellites. Yet matters were different in 1991 because EUMETSAT had established structures for managing its own technical and financial affairs and wanted more control of the technology it was paying for.

The Long-Term Management Policy examined a number of options, but proposed that EUMETSAT have full responsibility for both ground and space segments. For the space segment, the document acknowledged that EUMETSAT needed a partner with experience in space, possibly ESA, whilst the underlying assumption for the ground segment was that EUMETSAT would assume direct operational control of its own satellites. The Policy was not adopted at the fifteenth Council meeting, but it precipitated considerable debate between ESA and EUMETSAT and among EUMETSAT's delegations during the next nine months.

Between EUMETSAT and ESA there was tension about interpretation of the role that EUMETSAT's space partner would play. ESA made clear that it could not act as a project manager implementing EUMETSAT's plans. The Agency explained that as a publicly-funded research and development organisation, it could not adopt a role more suited to a commercial enterprise. Yet EUMETSAT was keen to have control over how its money was spent and did not want to pay for new and risky technology that might put its operational reliability at risk.

To complicate matters, ESA was itself debating its own role in Earth observation at the time. In a 1991 policy document, ESA's Programme Board for Earth Observation (PB-EO) concluded that the Agency had a long-term role in research and development and in-orbit demonstration of Earth observation systems, but the aim should be to transfer financial and programmatic responsibility for the continuation of developed systems over to operational entities.

During discussions about the relationship between ESA and EUMETSAT at the eleventh meeting of the PAC in October 1991, delegates

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