Meteorology, Meteorological, History

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HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p69.

HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p67.

p68

high costs could be reduced. Several of the more northern countries that would benefit less from a sounding mission in geostationary orbit supported the UK.

France felt strongly that MSG satellites should retain a sounding mission. The UK then reiterated its view, first expressed during the fifth Council meeting a year earlier that the Council should also consider a simple follow-on to Meteosat. Eventually the Council took an informal poll and, with the exception of the UK, the delegates voted to keep the Bath baseline for Phase-A studies. The one vote against, however, meant loss of the Bath baseline because unanimity would be needed when EUMETSAT came to formally adopt an MSG programme.

The Chairman of the PAC then suggested that pre-Phase-A studies of alternative concepts should be studied before entering Phase-A. In the end the Council accepted this approach.

During the second half of 1988, a number of National Meteorological Services also began their own studies to evaluate the impact that sounding from geostationary orbit might have on operational meteorology. And, as often happens when the Council reached an impasse, the matter was referred for further study to the PAC. This postponement of a decision about which technical concept would enter Phase-A studies was the first serious delay in the MSG programme and it led to the need for the MTP (see chapter 4).

Whilst EUMETSAT debated alternative instrumentation packages, ESA began studying an advanced spinner, an option that would reduce weight and costs. During 1989 and 1990 whenever the heading "Meteosat Second Generation" appears in the Council documents, the debate reported is about technical issues and details of rival instrument concepts. Then in May 1990 at its twelfth meeting, the EUMETSAT Council endorsed the idea that the MSG satellites should be spinners, with an imager as the core payload. The radiometer for the MSG was to be designed to provide data continuity with the existing satellites and enable meteorologists to deduce information about atmospheric instability.

Six months later, at the thirteenth Council meeting in November 1990, delegates established a preparatory programme for MSG. This programme was scheduled to run for one year from 1 January 1991. With a price tag of 4 MECU, the programme was comparatively modest, but it meant that EUMETSAT's own in-house efforts to prepare for a full-blown programme were formally under way.

EUMETSAT's technical endorsement of a spinner was influenced by the difficulties and delays that NOAA was experiencing in the design of its new three-axis stabilised GOES-Next satellites. These difficulties did not make the three-axis stabilised satellite look like an attractive option to EUMETSAT. On the other hand, ESA's studies of an advanced spinner did look promising.

Parallel to the technical debates, the Organisation had been addressing the critical policy issues that had to be settled if MSG and all other projects were to become more than paper tigers. First, of course, the need to move Meteosat-3 to provide the USA with warning of tropical storms and hurricanes developing over the Atlantic precipitated EUMETSAT's review of its Convention, a review that was necessary to provide a sound framework for new programmes like MSG. Secondly, within the MTP, EUMETSAT

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