 Meteosat First Generation is a series of geostationary satellites that have provided images of the full Earth disc, and data for weather forecasts, in a continuous and reliable stream for 25 years. The first Meteosat, Meteosat-1, was launched in 1977, and the last of the first generation, Meteosat-7, was launched on 2 September 1997.
The main benefits of the Meteosat system are the generation of images of the Earth — showing its cloud systems by day and night — and the transmission of these images to the users in the shortest practical time. Thus supporting services which fall roughly into two categories: real-time services and off-line services. Meteosat First Generation's primary mission is to provide high resolution imagery of the Indian Ocean and surrounding areas. The Meteosat Visible and InfraRed Imager (MVIRI) provides the basic data of the Meteosat system, in the form of radiances from the visible and infrared parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. The instrument allows continuous imaging of the Earth. It provides the data for many meteorological and research applications, enabling detailed monitoring of the state of the atmosphere, from which a predicted state may be interpolated, on the basis of physical understanding and past experience of the atmosphere.
The Early Years in Europe In 1968, the eight-nation European Space Research Organisation (ESRO), which became the European Space Agency (ESA), received funding for studies of application satellites, including weather satellites. Meteosat introduced the concept of a global system of geostationary platforms capable of observing the atmospheric circulation and weather around the equator, in near real-time. In September 1972 ESRO officially adopted the Meteosat programme and launched the first prototype Meteosat in November 1977, followed by Meteosat-2 in 1981. EUMETSAT and the Meteosat Operational Programme In January 1981 an Intergovernmental Conference of 17 European countries was convened to consider the matter of long-term continuity of Meteosat. The Conference decided that a new specialised operational organisation was needed and, in a second session in March 1983, agreed on the Convention for the future EUMETSAT organisation. At the same time, the Member States of the European Space Agency agreed to initiate the Meteosat Operational Programme (MOP), involving the construction of three further satellites which could, in due course, be handed over to EUMETSAT. The three satellites developed within the MOP were launched, between 1989 and 1993, as Meteosat-4, -5 and -6. Meteosat-3 was an old engineering prototype, which was launched in 1988 after refurbishment to successfully fill the gap until Meteosat-4 became operational. The Meteosat Transition Programme In May 1991 the EUMETSAT Council took the decision to establish its own independent ground segment, to replace the system established by ESA in 1977. This represented the start of the Meteosat Transition Programme (MTP), which was to cover the period from the phasing out of the MOP to the start of the Meteosat Second Generation programme. On 15 November 1995, control of the Meteosat satellites in orbit was passed to EUMETSAT, following 18 years of successful operations by ESA. Meteosat-7, the final satellite in the series, was launched on 2 September 1997. First generation satellites continue to support the Indian Ocean Data Coverage (IODC) service. Meteosat First Generation satellites
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Copyright © EUMETSAT. All rights reserved.
European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![[Internal link]](/groups/jsp/documents/fragmentassets/icon_link_coloured.gif){kind=icon}
Satellite Programmes Overview![[Internal link]](/groups/jsp/documents/fragmentassets/icon_link_coloured_down.gif){kind=icon}
Meteosat First Generation
Further details on coverage and data dissemination (PDF, 184 KB)
Print 