The first of EUMETSAT's Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) geostationary satellites - called Meteosat-12 - has become fully operational. It gives an important and welcome boost to the ability of the WMO community to forecast extreme weather and monitor climate change.
The two main instruments on board Meteosat-12, the Flexible Combined Imager and the Lightning Imager, play a crucial role in enabling meteorological services to help protect lives and livelihoods by providing high-resolution, accurate data for predicting severe weather events.
Data from Meteosat-12's instruments are now being disseminated to national meteorological services and others for operational use and are expected to have a significant impact on weather forecasting and understanding of our climate.
"MTG is one of the most innovative and complex meteorological satellite systems ever built," EUMETSAT Director-General Phil Evans said.
MTG satellites will ensure the continuity of data for weather forecasting from geostationary orbit for the next 20 years. This significantly enhances the meteorological imaging capabilities and brings completely new measurement capability for near real-time lightning imaging, which is completely new for European weather satellites.
"The high-resolution and frequent repeat cycle of the Meteosat-12 imager will greatly help the WMO community to improve forecasts of severe weather as well as long-term climate monitoring, marine applications, and agricultural meteorology," said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo.
The Flexible Combined Imager utilizes two scanning services to build a picture of fast-evolving events. The imager scans the entire Earth disc in just 10 minutes through its full disc scanning service, and scans Europe and northern Africa every 2.5 minutes through the rapid scanning service in the future.
Meteosat-12 also carries the Data Collection and Retransmission Service (DCS) and the Geostationary Search and Rescue Relay (GEOSAR) transponder.
The DCS acquires observations and environmental data from ground-based meteorological platforms in its field of view then transmits them to the MTG ground segment. The GEOSAR transponder acquires signals from distress beacons in its field of view and transmits them to rescue services.
Beside remarkable improvement in meteorological satellite imagery in Europe, Meteosat-12 will improve the observation capabilities in Africa, where in-situ or other remote sensing observations are largely not available. High resolution imager together with lightning detection provided will be a great improvement for African weather services in their operational weather forecasting services.
"Innovative satellite technology like the Meteosat-12 satellite's ability to capture lightning observations as a precursor of severe weather supports us in achieving the goals of the interntional Early Warnings for All initiative," said Celeste Saulo.
Meteosat 12 contributes to the several requested enhancements of the Vision for the WMO Integrated Global Observing System (WIGOS) 2040 document, which provides high-level targets to guide the evolution of the global observing network in the coming decades. It is the outcome of WMO work with space agencies through the Coordination Group for Meteorological Satellites (CGMS) to coordinate the global planning of meteorological and environmental satellite missions vital for weather forecasts, life-saving early warning services, and monitoring climate change.
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