Meteosat Third Generation Flexible Combined Imager for the continuous monitoring of severe storms from space

Satellite observations provide a unique way of observing the Earth and the weather that we are experiencing on the surface, as they have the potential of providing data over a large spatial area at a high temporal resolution. With new satellite technologies, the ability to better predict, detect and monitor severe weather is improving, allowing for more precise weather forecasting, now-casting and analysis.

With the Flexible Combined Imager (FCI), EUMETSAT is following along this path, with the first instrument recently launched on-board the first Meteosat Third Generation satellite on December 13th, 2022. FCI is a multi-spectral imager with 16 spectral channels that will continuously monitor the evolution of weather over Europe, Africa and the Atlantic Ocean with a spatial resolution up to 500 meter and a temporal resolution up to 2.5 minutes in rapid scanning mode.

These new and novel data will be a leap forward for the observation of deep convection and severe weather and in this presentation we will give an overview of the FCI instrument and its data and products. In addition to Level-1 data, FCI will provide a suite of geophysical Level-2 products useful for detecting and monitoring deep convection and severe storms, including cloud macro- and microphysical properties, atmospheric instability indices and atmospheric motion vectors. With the new FCI data we also have the ability for the first time to derive geostationary true colour imagery over Europe and Africa, offering a good reference for the human eye when observing and now-casting severe storms. With several months into the commissioning phase, we finally hope to conclude the presentation by demonstrating some of the major improvements of this new instrument by showing the first actual measurement data.