A LITTLE while ago, on the evening of Tuesday, June 25th, you may have noticed with some bemusement that the RTE weather forecast was introduced in German. Later it became apparent that Aidan Nulty was transmitting it from Darmstadt, and that this little novelty had been organised to mark the 10th birthday of an entity called EUMETSAT. Let me explain the little celebration.
EUMETSAT is the workaday title of the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites a co-operative venture involving 17 European nations to provide weather satellites for forecasters in Europe and elsewhere. Space activity, however, in an almost literal sense, is astronomically expensive and the only way in which most countries can afford participation is to pool resources and share the necessary costs.
Satellite meteorology in Europe began with the launch of METEOSAT-1 by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 1977. Satellites however, like any electronic gadgetry, go wrong from time to time, and as yet it is not possible to send a repair person into space to fix them. Moreover, even at best they have a limited span of life of the order of four or five years. To ensure continuity, therefore, it is desirable to have two satellites in orbit at any one time so METEOSAT-2 was launched in June 1981. Both these were experimental spacecraft, but the whole venture was so successful that it was decided to establish a permanent frame a work whereby further operational satellites could be launched to provide a continuing facility in future decades.
Thus EUMETSAT was born in June 1986. It is governed by a council on which all the 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 such as Ireland. EUMETSAT took over from ESA the funding and day today operation of Europe's weather satellites, and has, now become an essential cornerstone of European meteorology. METEOSAT-3 and METEOSAT-4 were launched soon after its establishment and were followed by METEOSATs 5 and 6 more recently. The latest, METEOSAT-7, is due for launch in 1997.
EUMETSAT was 10 years old this year, and it was to celebrate this milestone that it invited each of its member states to send one of their television weather personnel to Darmstadt to broadcast their national forecast from the organisation's headquarters on June 25th. Eleven countries, including Ireland, availed themselves of this novel opportunity.