Shortly after the last full stop has been firmly etched upon this latest offering to Weather Eye, its scribe will take to the air again to visit Darmstadt. Anticipation of the object of this journey brings to mind the words of Peter Abelard:
Quis rex, quae curia, quale palatium,
Quae pax, quae requies, quod illud gaudium.
The venue is the palatial headquarters of EUMETSAT, the European Meteorological Satellite Organisation, in the ancient capital in Germany of the Grand Duchy of Hesse. The occasion is the 20th anniversary of the launch of the first Meteosat geostationary weather satellite in November 1977, and the celebrations, hosted by EUMETSAT director, Dr Tillmann Mohr, and his celestial curia, will be attended by distinguished delegations from the 17 memberstates. Yes indeed!:
What a king, what a court, how fine a palace, What peace, what rest, what fine rejoicing there will be.
Arthur C. Clarke, better known to the world at large, perhaps, for his popular works of science fiction, is credited with being the first to suggest the advantages of geostationary orbit. He saw it as a way of providing global telecommunications links, and in a memorandum prepared for the British Interplanetary Society in May, 1945, he envisaged "a chain of space stations with an orbital period of 24 hours. The stations would lie in the Earth's equatorial plane, and would thus always remain fixed in the same spots in the sky from the point of view of terrestrial observers. Unlike other heavenly bodies they would never rise nor set."
This trick can be achieved by launching a satellite in such a way that it ends up just 23,000 miles above the equator, and when some years later, Clarke's idea came to be reality, meteorologists were among the first to realise the benefits for their activities. A geostationary satellite, being as it were fixed in space, looks down constantly at the same segment of the globe, and successive images at, say, halfhourly intervals, can be combined to form a "movie" of the evolving weather situation. Thus it was that on November 23rd, 1977, Europe's first geostationary weather satellite, Meteosat-1, was placed in orbit over the equator just a little west of Africa. Like any satellite, it had a limited life, and the series has continued up to (I) Meteosat-7 which was launched only a month or so ago. But, naturally, the firstborn of the family has a special place in the hearts of European meteorologists - which explains quod illud gaudium in Darmstadt later today.