The newest European weather satellite, MTG-I1, was launched on 13 December 2022 from Kourou spaceport aboard a Ariane 5.
After the launch, the satellite was guided to its place on the geostationary orbit and commissioned. The cameras and instruments were calibrated, and now the first photos were released today on 4 May 2023.
These first “sneak previews” of what it can produce give confidence that expectations the MTG system will herald a new era in the forecasting of severe weather events will be met.
The satellite, its instruments and the ground-based infrastructure required to process images are undergoing further testing, calibration and validation until late 2023, when the images will be produced every 10 minutes and released operationally for use in weather forecasts.
The level of detail of cloud structures visible in the images below is extraordinarily important to weather forecasters. That additional detail from the higher resolution imagery, coupled with the fact that images will be produced more frequently, means forecasters will be able to detect and predict severe weather events more rapidly and accurately. Many of the details in MTG-I1’s image are not as clearly visible, or not visible at all, in imagery from the instruments on the current Meteosat Second Generation satellites.
See the photos and read more about the satellite here:
https://www.eumetsat.int/features/discover-first-images-mtg-i1