EUMETSAT Data Centre

Overview of the data centre

The data centre aims to:

• Guarantee a long-term preservation of data and generated products from EUMETSAT’s meteorological satellites.
• Enable users to browse, make automated orders, and retrieve data from EUMETSAT's catalogue of products.

Set up in 1995, the data centre has developed to become a state-of-the-art archive serving all EUMETSAT satellite programmes.

With around 300 meteorological satellite products available — in the case of Meteosat spanning a record of more than 30 years (since 1981) — the data centre offers one of Europe’s largest and most comprehensive collections in this field.

Currently around 5PB of data volume are stored in the data centre and made available to the data centre users. The charts below show the development of archive retrieval and ingestion over time.

Accessing meteorological data and products in the data centre

All archived data can be accessed through the data centre online ordering client, used for searching, selecting and ordering products. For related issues you may wish to consult the ordering FAQ or the ordering client known issues section on the main ordering client page.

The EUMETSAT archive comprises the following collections of satellite product types from the various EUMETSAT-operated satellites, including:

• Images and derived meteorological products from geostationary Meteosat satellites since 1981, which are positioned to provide images over Europe as well as the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
• Metop-A, Metop-B and Metop-C data, since 2007, including global and regional products of the various sensors, i.e. AMSU, ASCAT, AVHRR, GOME-2, GRAS, HIRS, IASI, MHS.
• Jason-2 and Jason-3 data, since 2008, including various sea surface altimetry products.
• Copernicus Sentinel-3 data and marine products.
• Product entries or catalogue collections from the EUMETSAT network of Satellite Application Facilities (SAFs) since 2008, including climate, oceanographic and atmospheric products.
• Data from international partners, including AVHRR data from NOAA, since 2006.

Information about data centre products can be found using the Product Navigator.The information presented for each product includes a data access link under the EUMETSAT data centre distribution that conveniently pre-selects the chosen product in the online ordering application, for ordering.