How EUMETSAT connects communities to deliver products and services seamlessly

Increasing society’s resilience to high-impact natural events and climate change requires coordinated research and new investments in earth observation and prediction. EUMETSAT (The European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites), together with its international partners provides the backbone of the global meteorological space based observing system.

In the next five years, EUMETSAT will launch the new generation of its main geostationary and polar systems as well as several new missions of the Copernicus Programme on behalf of the European Union, meeting the requirements for a vast set of applications, including global and regional numerical weather prediction, nowcasting, atmospheric composition and ocean monitoring as well as climate.

Those systems will bring an unprecedented observational capacity benefiting the full weather/climate value chain. We would present an overview of the main applications to key sectors, ranging from nowcasting to long term climate record and CO2 monitoring. 

In the near future, additional polar missions could complement the mandatory programs with specific focus on wind measurements and microwave soundings. Socio-economic impact assessment could be presented as a guidance for future studies and programmes.

With the objective to get these new observations made available as widely as possible, and to generate maximum impact on economies and societies, EUMETSAT is also embarked in the development of a set of innovative big data services, making use of latest IT, AI and ML technologies. These efforts are developed in close coordination with European National Meteorological Services, EUMETNET and ECMWF.