Meteorology, Meteorological, History

An IGO
monit-
oring
weather and
climate
change

HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p66.

HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p64.

p65

overruled. Clearly, if EUMETSAT were positively inclined toward MSG, Europe's space ministers would look more favourably on the Executive's inclusion of a funding request to develop the mission requirements of these satellites.

EUMETSAT's newly formed Policy Advisory Committee (PAC) was well aware that endorsing ESA's plans for MSG would help to keep the programme alive. Given EUMETSAT's need for data continuity from geostationary orbit, the Committee declared at its first meeting in the Summer of 1987 that MSG was the Organisation's highest priority. The Committee also recommended that EUMETSAT should play a significant role in the development of the space segment. Once the mission requirements and outline design (pre-Phase-A and Phase-A studies respectively)¹³ were established, the PAC further said that EUMETSAT and ESA should undertake the work jointly and that co-decisions should be mandatory. This was an early declaration of a policy position which was not formalised until the eighteenth Council meeting adopted the Resolution on Long-Term Management Policy in March 1992 (see chapter 4).

The Secretariat responded to the PAC's views by preparing a document proposing how EUMETSAT could work with ESA to develop a successor to Meteosat. Presented to the fifth Council in September 1987, the document assigned the tentative costs to the MSG programme. Procurement of the satellites could cost 600 MECU, said the Secretariat, minus a contribution of 243 MECU from ESA. ESA's contribution, acknowledged the document, would have to be dependent on the satellite and mission being sufficiently innovative to justify expenditure of funds for research and development. Three launches and the ground segment could cost 177 MECU and operations would be 14 MECU annually from 1995. The difference between these costs and those eventually settled on (1035 MECU at 1992 economic conditions from EUMETSAT alone) shows just how the cost of space projects tends to grow as the fruits of brainstorming sessions take on the reality of hardware and software.

During discussions in the Council following presentation of this document, all the issues that were to dominate debate for the next three years - descoping, cost cutting, relationships with ESA, the value of sounding data from geostationary orbit - were raised.

The UK challenged the costs, arguing that the system could be made more affordable by reducing the satellites' technical complexity (descoping). The satellite, argued the UK, could be as simple as a follow-on to the current MOP series built with components made from more advanced technology, but carrying no sounders. In support of this argument, the UK argued correctly at the time - that sounding data from the US NOAA geostationary satellites were not widely used in NWP. NWP, answered France, was not the only customer for sounding data. What about recent weather catastrophes in the

13 - At this stage in the development of MSG, EUMETSAT's documents refer to pre-Phase-A and Phase-A studies as described above in the text. A few years later, EUMETSAT's terminology, in line with that of the European Space Agency, is: Phase-A - feasibility studies, Phase-B - system specifications, Phase-C/D - detailed design, manufacture, assembly integration and test, Phase-E - operations and exploitation.

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.

eChapter| |TOP

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