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

Don't forget about Euclid, giving us by far the most in-depth view of our universe!

Check out their video on what kind of data it unlocks if you have five minutes and want to get your mind blown. https://youtube.com/watch?v=rXCBFlIpvfQ

ADM-Aeolus was a stellar project too.

As far as I can tell, they say: "Mission control and data distribution are managed by EUMETSAT." They have published their own blog post here: https://www.eumetsat.int/features/see-earths-atmosphere-neve...

There they say that: "Observations made by MTG-S1 will feed into data products that support national weather services …". So I guess there will be no simple, publicly available REST API or so... but if anybody finds anything, let us know here :)

Unlikely. EU countries are consistently restrictive about access to this kind of data. Even when it is available, it often has odd restrictive licensing. This is an area where the US, with its liberal data access policies, is far ahead of Europe.

Something else to keep in mind is that the data products are extremely large. It would be expensive to give the public access. I used to host these types of data sets for EU countries. The workload just from authorized users is resource intensive, it doesn't scale cheaply. (I once woke up to find a metaphorical smoking crater where my server racks were because an authorized user shared his credentials with a few friends overnight.)

Core data is CC-BY-4.0, "recommended" data is licensed with a fee for certain commercial uses.

https://user.eumetsat.int/resources/user-guides/data-registr...

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...

There was a good CCC talk on pulling images from weather sats (and data from other satellites) - https://youtu.be/fM5w7bFNvWI?si=Dq6S6nYOE_frAd7b

It's been done before, but this was a great talk imo.

Yes, it will be freely available to the public

I guess you will be able to access the data with copernicus (usually thy even provide raw L0 data)

Definitely not in anything like realtime, maybe an archive. There's a licence fee of 8000EUR/yr to access real-time EUMETSAT data. Welcome to Europe, where you pay for everything twice.

Europe is widely acknowledged as having arguably the best global weather systems. This isn't new. There are only a handful of organizations world-wide maintaining global weather models.

The US government, uniquely, maintains two independent global weather models. Neither is as good as the European model. Arguments have been made for combining the US budgets to produce a best-in-class weather model but politics makes that unlikely to happen.

Europe was always great in weather/earth observation from space.

Their stuff basically works 24/7/365 without causing much noise. With fully automated data intake processes.

Europe has always been #1 in weather forecast.

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.

I was curious but it’s surprisingly hard to find info. These guys [1] are pretty stoked about “nowcasting”—which seems to be on sub-10-minute timescales to issue local severe weather warnings and such. It appears current sounders don’t scan as often.

This project ppt from 2011 [2] references different requirements for different areas/teams and shows the instrument spits out readings at 150 Mbit/s, which seems like a good clip. Overall it sounds like a lot of local knowledge is involved in turning this output into forecasts. Maybe there’s not a precise answer to your question.

Somebody else must know more.

[1]: https://www.eumetsat.int/features/think-global-act-local

[2]: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Donny-Aminou/publicatio...

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.

I work in the domain, and it is true that many of the startups will almost entirely use free data, like from the sentinel satellites via ESA. It really lowers the barriers to entry, if you have a nice idea.

EDIT:

We actually work close with one startup that sprung out from academia. The founders wrote their masters thesis on object detection and pattern recognition using sentinel imaging. They had basically one product: to detect certain objects. After a couple of years they had gotten a handful of customers (basically they'd receive coordinates to some are of interest, and then tasked with trying to detect something), which afforded them to purchase commercial data (from other types of sensors) for building more robust systems. This in turn grew their customer bas, and they started adding products.

Then they were acquired by one of the largest private space companies.

But, in any case, it all started with access to free data. Would they have started a company like this, if they hadn't had access to the data from ESA? Who knows, but it made it all much easier. And they were able to completely bootstrap the company.

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/

There are even Hackathons from ESA:

"Act in Space"

https://actinspace.org/

I worked at one of the hosts of one these events years ago - very intersting people there!

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's a pretty great blog following european space news

https://europeanspaceflight.com/

A lot has been happening in recent years with launchers once ESA broke the Ariane "chokehold".

At this point, calling ISAR a competitor to SpaceX feels a bit like calling Pringles a competitor to TSMC, but it's certainly good to see some movement happening.

For sure, it's booming in the current climate. My biggest bet for 2026 is Eutelsat which is the biggest star link competitor.

Europe is behind in launchers, but the stuff they send up is top-notch.

Euclid, the latest ESA telescope is particularly mind-blowing, capturing a third of the visible sky in incredible detail.

Check out this update video, it's insane how they can zoom in on stuff: https://youtube.com/watch?v=rXCBFlIpvfQ

Can you show some actual evidence of that? Because evidence actually shows that commercial growth in the US outpaces Europe by a gigantic degree. The traditional European companies like Airbus has made lots of loses. European companies are not even competing in the LEO race to any serious degree.

Their 'compete with SpaceX' Ariane 6 rocket has been an unmitigated disaster. And in order to 'compete with SpaceX' they are giving billions in subsidies to Amazon instead, I guess that is better. And its exactly what they didn't want to do when they designed the Ariane 6 program in the first place.

> companies like ISAR Aerospace (SpaceX competitor)

If anything they are a far, far, far inferior competitor of RocketLab. SpaceX isn't even in the same universe as ISAR.

The simple fact is, small rocket companies are not viable, and pretty much all of them are not profitable and/or go bust. RocketLab itself basically never made money from rockets, the pivoted mostly to in-space stuff.

Maybe one of the small European rocket companies can survive if it gets enough support from ESA, but then moving on to anything beyond that is going to be hard.

> NASA, and is heavily investing there

If we look at ESA and EU space budget, we can see that it goes up a bit, but nowhere near close to anything in the US.

So yes, there is some energy in the European space sector, but its very easy to overestimate, and specially if you look at it compared to the US.

The Trump administration is probably helping quite a bit on two fronts here:

- A very strong political will to decouple strategic industries from the US

- The US is making it a lot harder to work there. So top talent stays in Europe.

Those are proposed cuts and it is certainly possible Congress pushes back on most of those, as they did with NASA.

Don't worry, it's just a few shadows of the Vogon Construction fleet: https://scifi.fandom.com/wiki/Vogon_Constructor_Fleet

I see this comment being downvoted, but it made me giggle, thanks :)

(Wrong thread; think you meant to post this on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46809069.)

Picking it up is no problem for some specialists in the (ham) radio scene. They are mastering X- and S-band stuff so good that even the NASA asked them to join in some observations in the past.

But: Meteosat is very famous for encrypting their stuff.

See my comment above re a CCC.de video from 38C3.

Probably, if your weather app doesn't use a good data source for your area(s).

Try a different app. Some let you choose from a list of different weather sources.