Today there will be a little celebration at my place of work. It is a birthday - not of a president or king or queen, or of some venerated local saint, or even of some colleague held in high esteem in meteorology, but more importantly, of EUMETSAT. The organisation is 15 years old today.
Satellite meteorology in Europe began with the launch of Meteosat-1 by the European Space Agency in 1977. Satellites, however, have a limited span of life, so Meteosat-2 was launched in 1981. Both were experimental spacecraft, and the venture was so successful that it was decided to set up a permanent framework where operational satellites could be launched to provide weather images in perpetuity.
Thus EUMETSAT, the European Meteorological Satellites Organisation, was born on June 19th, 1986. It is governed by a council on which all of its 17 member-states are represented, and its activities are funded from contributions based on the GNP of individual nations - the larger countries, naturally, paying substantially more than smaller states, like Ireland. The headquarters and satellite control centre are in Darmstadt, Germany.
EUMETSAT is now an essential cornerstone of European meteorology, and in the intervening years it has ensured the continuity of the Meteosat weather satellites. These "geostationary" spacecraft circle our planet 22,000 miles above the equator, with their speed in orbit exactly matched to that of the rotating Earth below. By this arrangement, Meteosat appears to an observer on the ground to be fixed in space over a point where the equator cuts the west coast of Africa, which allows it to collect images of the same area of the globe all the time.
There have been seven Meteosats, of which three are still in operation. Meteosat-7 is the one which provides the images you see on television every evening; Meteosat-6, which it replaced, is on standby; and Meteosat-5, well past its predicted best-before date but still operating normally, fills what used to a gap in image coverage over the Indian Ocean.
The first of a new series of geostationary satellites, Meteosat Second Generation, is scheduled for launch next year, with instruments much more versatile than those on the current spacecraft. There are also plans for a European series of "polar-orbiting" weather satellites - satellites that travel around the globe from pole-to-pole, following the lines of longitude, and which, being only 500 miles or so above the Earth, can collect more detailed information than the geostationaries.