A new generation weather satellite will be launched into space at the end of this year. When it starts sending its images and measurements, meteorologists will get wildly more information to support weather forecasting.
11:45•Updated 12:08
CANNES On the French Riviera, in Cannes, satellites are being built right next to the sandy beach. A new European weather satellite is currently being built in the large industrial complex that originally grew out of an aircraft assembly hall and now belongs to the Thales Alenia Space company. It was presented to the public this Wednesday.
The new Meteosat is an impressive looking cube. It is a box over five meters long and a little less than three meters in diameter, which is covered with a black, mat-like thermal protection layer.
A white horn protrudes from its “top”, which is actually a small space telescope that will look towards the Earth. The camera equipment photographs the entire globe and especially Europe with 16 different wavelengths of light.
There are four lenses under the horn, whose task is to calculate the lightning of thunderstorms – they tell the danger and location of violent winds very precisely.
When the satellite rides towards space at the end of this year in the nose of the Ariane 5 rocket, its mass will be around 3,800 kilograms. Once in orbit, it is placed over the equator about 36,000 kilometers from Earth, where its rotation period is exactly one day.
From its position, it is able to continuously monitor weather phenomena that threaten Europe.
Storm warning in advance
European weather forecasters have received help from the sky since the late 1970s, when the first Meteos was sent into space. Seven of them were sent into space, also to places other than Europe.
From the beginning of the 21st century, the old Meteosats were replaced by Meteosats of the second generation, and now it is the turn to replace them with satellites of the third generation. These are supposed to be in use for two decades.
The third generation brings great improvements. Pictures are obtained faster, they are more detailed and contain much more information. The lightning detector can see individual flashes of lightning and, based on them, warn of dangerous weather areas even before they become really dangerous.
Lightning is also detected by ground-based devices, but the satellite’s counter sees lightning from within the clouds as well, and its field of view also covers the oceans.
‘s meteorologists are also excitedly waiting for the new satellite.
– One advantage of MTG satellites is almost real-time monitoring, he says Jesse Heikkilä.
According to Heikkilä, the benefit this brings is especially emphasized in summer thunderstorm situations, when convection clouds that herald thunderstorms begin to form.
– Precise observations can also be used to directly define which of the weather models produced by simulations, obtained from slightly different starting values, seems to be realised.
For example, now in August in Finland, it has been difficult to predict the weather, because the forecasts extending to the end of the day have differed a lot from each other.
– It is usually seen in the fact that in one model the rain area is, for example, over Etelä-Savo and in another model over Uusimaa or Varsinais-Suomen. There can also be differences in humidity or temperature – there are dozens if not hundreds of comparable parameters in weather models.
A researcher from Meteo France, the French Meteorological Institute, who was involved in making the satellite Herve Roquet speculated to at the presentation of the satellite, that with the help of the new Meteosat, an advance warning of dangerous weather phenomena can be obtained about two hours earlier than now.
– For example, in the devastating floods in Corsica last week or in the summer, this earlier information would have been necessary so that people could have been evacuated and property protected sooner.
Roquet reminds us that just one such early warning of a rapidly developing, dangerous storm could pay back the costs of the entire satellite project.
A total of four new Meteosats will be made, which will be launched into space at regular intervals. In this way, they are certainly capable of continuous, regular operation.
The price tag is about four billion euros, when satellite launches and use are included.
Another satellite makes a 4D image of the atmosphere
Meteosat, which has now been completed, is officially called MTG-I1, i.e. third-generation Meteosat imaging satellite number 1.
It has been designed and manufactured for 12 years. No wonder that the project manager of the Thales Alenia Space company responsible for the work Pierre Armand is pleased to see the satellite almost ready.
– We will still attach the solar panels to the satellite, and after that it can be transported to the launch site.
The launch will take place with an Ariane 5 launch vehicle from the Kourou Space Center in South America at the end of this year.
– I sigh with relief only when I see the satellite inside the rocket and when it rises towards the sky.
In addition to these “imaging satellites”, a “scanning satellite”, i.e. MTG-S, is in the works, the first of which will be sent to accompany the satellite that is now being completed in two years.
The scanner looks similar, but instead of the camera and flash detector, there is a device that can be used to form a three-dimensional image of the atmosphere. It can, as it were, slice the atmosphere into pieces of a couple of kilometers and photograph each slice separately.
Herve Roquet says that it is actually a 4D model of the atmosphere, because in addition to the three-dimensional image, there is also a time dimension: the situation can be continuously monitored.
Help! Too much information?
When the new satellite is operational, it will produce an image of the entire Earth once every ten minutes and a close-up image of Europe every 2.5 minutes. In time, the scanning satellite makes its cross-section every five minutes.
In total, the new Meteosat produces about 50 times more data than the current Meteosat. It also causes a headache.
Eumetsat, the European weather satellite organization that operates Meteosat, has already prepared for the data flood in advance.
MTG project manager at Eumetsat Alexander Schmidt says that information systems have been developed at the same time as the satellite has been made, and that the Meteorological Institutes of the organization’s member countries have been trained to use the hugely increasing amount of data.
– In addition, the jump to the new generation takes place calmly. First, we test the operation of the satellite in space, then we adjust its observations to match the observations of the current Meteosat, and only after the satellites have operated simultaneously for a short time, we retire the old satellite.
Although the satellite, which is now still in Cannes’ clean room, will send its first images in a few months, the device will be fully responsible for weather observations in Europe only in a couple of years.