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Europe’s next-generation weather satellite sends back first images

esa.int

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Re: Europe’s next-generation weather satellite sends back first images

#11

I recently met a European space startup founder and was surprised to learn how much space innovation is happening in Europe with ESA. Europe wants to become less depended on SpaceX and NASA, and is heavily investing there. More funding + strong aerospace programs at universities like TU Munich has led to companies like ISAR Aerospace (SpaceX competitor), which is great to see.

maiaspace (https://www.maia-space.com/) also intends to compete with SpaceX and is an Ariane spin-off, they're meant to do their first launch this year and start putting satellites in LEO in 27

Re: Europe’s next-generation weather satellite sends back first images

#12

I recently met a European space startup founder and was surprised to learn how much space innovation is happening in Europe with ESA. Europe wants to become less depended on SpaceX and NASA, and is heavily investing there. More funding + strong aerospace programs at universities like TU Munich has led to companies like ISAR Aerospace (SpaceX competitor), which is great to see.

If you are ever in Munich and want to find out more, be sure to visit the ESO Supernova[0].

[0] https://supernova.eso.org/

Re: Europe’s next-generation weather satellite sends back first images

#13
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an improvement as it provides better data and has nothing to do with the models that are used in a separate step to forcast anything. But that is said in the article as well, with the satellite being the first hyperspectral view on Europe and North Africa. I am not sure what to make if your question.

Ultimately better data will lead to and enable better models and forecasts, but I'm sure it's not super easy to put a number to that.

Been pulling in some of the newer data and concepts from open-meteo to my home weather display specifically the ensemble data, helps to provide some level of spread over the forecast, I mean I am not that sure how useful it is but I kinda got used to reading it of the display.

https://openmeteo.substack.com/p/ensemble-weather-forecast-a... https://open-meteo.com/en/docs/ecmwf-api https://open-meteo.com/en/docs/ensemble-api

Re: Europe’s next-generation weather satellite sends back first images

#14
post #11

I recently met a European space startup founder and was surprised to learn how much space innovation is happening in Europe with ESA. Europe wants to become less depended on SpaceX and NASA, and is heavily investing there. More funding + strong aerospace programs at universities like TU Munich has led to companies like ISAR Aerospace (SpaceX competitor), which is great to see.

maiaspace ( https://www.maia-space.com/ ) also intends to compete with SpaceX and is an Ariane spin-off, they're meant to do their first launch this year and start putting satellites in LEO in 27

There is also a Spanish company which according to them, they were the first private European company to reach space with their rocket: https://www.pldspace.com/en/

Re: Europe’s next-generation weather satellite sends back first images

#18
post #2

Does anyone know what are we talking about in practice in terms of weather forecast prediction improvement? Like MAE/RMSE

This data is from the third generation of Meteosats, which are the European meteorological satellites. A lot like GOES in the north-America. The main improvement is really significant improvement in resolution. The resolution is, depending on the channel, 9 times better than in the second generation. The main improvement in forecasting comes due to better information in the initial condition of the numerical weather prediction, but it is hard to quantify in advance. I'd be surprised if MAE, over the 15 days the prediction spans, would improve more than 0.1 C, if we talk about the raw prediction. There are plenty of things that this data is used for, but I would say that improved nowcast of cloud coverage, and energy production related parameters are likely to benefit most from the improvement in resolution.

Re: Europe’s next-generation weather satellite sends back first images

#20

Would the data from this satellite be freely available to the public? I couldn't see anything obvious

As most EU projects yes. There was test data released last year to get you started.

https://user.eumetsat.int/resources/user-guides/getting-star...

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