Europe’s next-generation weather satellite sends back first images | Hacker News Reader

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

esa.int

708 pointssaubeidl99 comments

ESA has done a lot of good for public benefit with the Sentinel-1/2 missions. I happen to work with remote sensing and Sentinel data has been my entry point to the field.

I hope that ESA keeps pushing forward even more. I am afraid that although Sentinel missions are great, ESA projects are a bit demo-like and limited in scope. Europe should focus on scaling up and applying the tech, not just proving that ambitious projects are possible for their own sake.

ADM-Aeolus was a stellar project too.

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

Don't forget terrestrial observing from the ESO with ALMA, VLT, and the under construction ELT down in Chile.

Edit: If you watch the Euclid link above, please don't make the mistake I did and let the player auto select the crappy 720p50 version. Jump up to the 2160p version. It is more than worth it. But as advertised, if you are not impressed with Euclid's imagery after viewing the video, you must be dead.

> ESA projects are a bit demo-like and limited in scope

I am kind of confused by that statement, what more would you expect from the Copernicus Programme? Isn't it a technical improvements over NASA's LANDSAT programme?

I don't mean "demo-like" in terms of poor technology. I meant that this technology doesn't yield products or services with global scales to an extent it happens in the US. Google Maps successfully uses both LANDSAT and Sentinel imagery. This is the wider problem of European failure to build companies/systems on top of technology.

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

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

If they'll publish it through Copernicus, it'll probably show up here:

https://browser.dataspace.copernicus.eu/

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...

Well, at least in my experience with EU projects, they tend to be much more restrictive with data sharing than equivalent US institutions: e.g. a lot of paid EUMET data has publicly available NOAA equivalents - though usually of worse quality.

Not sure why you're being down-voted. US weather models are free. EU models are not.

Depends on which model. Only really the ECMWF weather model is not fully free. The German, French, Dutch, ... models are all free (regional and global models). Of course, these global models are generally less accurate than ECMWF, still ECMWF has a lot of free data available too. US models are also freely available, and quite easy to work with (as opposed to some European ones).

You can see the most important charts from the ECMWF model for free on ecmwf.int. But you will not get the data behind them.

Yes! That government agencies data is PD is a nice feature of US law, we should implement that in EU.

Try to ask the NRO for their images and see how you go :)

Intelligence gathering data vs weather data. Yeah, that's the same thing.

Not Public Domain, TD - Taxpayers Domain. :)

Take a look at https://zenodo.org/communities/eu/

Yes, it's not everything, but it's a start.

It is not an EU project. It is an ESA and EUMETSAT project. Neither is an EU organisation. Both have multiple non-EU members, and I do not think all EU countries are members of either.

Yes, it will be freely available to the public

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 :)

https://user.eumetsat.int/api-definitions/data-store-downloa...

nice find. so you need a client_id to access the API

Read the data store user guide. You have to register.

For the datasets, I tried to access (like the full disc image in visible wavelength, MTG 0 degree), it is sufficient to register at eumetsat to get a username and password. The eumdac python tool is probably the easiest way to access the data:

https://pypi.org/project/eumdac/

(If you do not want to use python, the --debug option is quite useful to see exactly the request made. The output is either some JSON metadata or a large zip with the netcdf data)

Most weather data isn't generally available by easy to query REST API's (at least not at the original sources). One side project I had I wanted to use NOMADs data, and it was quite a grind downloading and processing the raw datasets into something usable at an application level (or viable to expose via an API).

That’s why you have service/products that have the sole purpose of taking all these region specific data sources and processing them in to a generic json api.

The government orgs probably do it intentionally so they don’t have ten million devices pinging their servers to update weather widgets.

Check out open-meteo. They’ve got pretty extensive historical and forecast weather apis in easy to consume formats. https://open-meteo.com/en/features#available_apis

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.

Hah! I don't believe this for a second. No, you need the 8k, a business entity (at the very least), five different licenses of some sort, and then some form of accreditation.

There's an 8k license for "recommended" (not "core", which is free under CC-BY-4.0 for all purposes) data if you are a service provider or broadcaster:

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

There are also fees in some other circumstances, but not for "personal, educational, research" use.

lame, with GOES-18 you can just download the latest full disk image in real time. Makes for a nifty desktop background when combined with a systemd user timer that fetches the current picture of the earth every 15 minutes.

https://www.goes-r.gov/multimedia/dataAndImageryImagesGoes-1...

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.

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.)

Isn't EUMETSAT data usually under CC-by-SA 3.0? So all you have to do is to register with them and get your client ID for API access, or are there more hoops to jump through?

I don't know what you mean.

Data from the Copernicus program has always been fully available, served with a nice web UI, API for both near real time data and archives.

It's the best source of open satellite data by far.

As for the licensing, I never actually looked it up, so maybe you're right.

There are two aspects to this.

The licensing commonly restricts you to small hobbyist use cases. There are typically restrictions on use of data, the amount of data, and retention of data. I've never looked at Copernicus data before but it appears to have the same kinds of restrictions. This is the licensing equivalent of "source available" rather than true "open source". Hopefully they are improving on this front.

While the data may be available in theory, no one ever invests in the data infrastructure that would allow people to access it in practice. They always have a nice website and API but it is like trying to watch Youtube over a dial-up modem. Usable access is reserved for researchers with an approved use case.

The US government does an unusually good job at both of these in my experience. Even when US public data sets that are not readily available online, you have to contact someone, it is usually for good reason. For example, because they are multi-exabyte data sets sitting on tape somewhere that almost no one ever asks for.

Well it makes sense the public API has restrictions. They probably have separate enterprise licensing.

> restrictive about access to this kind of data

After all, we don't know if the weather consented to having its data displayed, or if it even allowed cookies.

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...

EUMETSAT publishes data as CC-BY 4.0 past a timeliness of 1 hour https://www.eumetsat.int/data-policy/eumetsat-data-policy.pd...

Look for your dataset here https://data.eumetsat.int/ (Note: you need registration but it is free).

EU citizens can get free access to it via Eumetcast DVB-S service for non-commercial use. A registration, an off-the-shelf DVB-S data receiver, a satellite dish and their decryption USB key is required. FOSS software like Satpy is available for processing those radiometric data. More info: https://user.eumetsat.int/resources/user-guides/eumet-cast-e...

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.

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!

Very cool!

Small odd thing, but that's the first tracking warning modal I've seen that says they don't actually use tracking. And I can decline the no tracking? Kinda funny.

"Advanced EU-regulatory conform implementation of latest requirements" ;-) ;-)

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

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.

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/

There were once about 300 small rocket companies. About 250 of them are dead by by now.

The Europeans were late to the game, and their companies got some late investment.

Out of those 300 companies basically 0 of them have actually made money with rockets. Companies like RocketLab pivoted to in-space stuff and that's where they actually make money.

Pretty much every single small rocket company has lost money with small rockets and pivots to larger rockets where there is more demand because of constellations. But in Europe, that will be near impossible because of the Ariane monopoly.

And closing the case on reuse for small rockets is even more difficult.

I really think calling companies that have barley done a test-launch 'spacex competitors' is a silly. At best its a luxury competitor to SpaceX ride-share launches.

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/

definitely worth a visit. loved the exhibition about the Atacama desert telescopes. especially great for kids.

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.

- Top talent doesn't even want to move to the US anymore either.

I mean really I'm super progressive and LGBTIQ+ aligned. I'm not even flying there for a meeting anymore, sorry. My employer is European and I'm part of the inclusion team, they are understanding me refusing US travel.

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".

Except of course the Ariane chockhold never existed for small rockets. Because Vega exists. And for large rockets the "chokehold" very much continues to exist and shows absolutely zero evidence of going away in the next decade.

So far the support for these small launchers has been mostly for new missions and nowhere near in the volume to support even two of these small launch companies. Specially if Vega also survives as a rocket.

Europe simply does not produce enough launches for these companies. And all of them will suffer from very low launch rates and non will be able to seriously compete for international payloads.

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.

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 back on the map. It´s going slow but steady. Hope they involve community in their tech projects.

Europe has always been #1 in weather forecast.

Google partnered with European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) to build weather models. Which begs the question: why didn't it partner with NOAA on its home turf?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/google-reveals-new...

Probably because that was Deepmind, which has been located in Europe since before and after the google acquisition.

I find HRRR3 typically predicts better for my use cases, do you have more information on how Europe has always been #1 in weather forecast? I wonder about what the asian people have done too

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 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 is widely acknowledged as having arguably the best global weather systems. The US government, uniquely, maintains two independent global weather models. Neither is as good as the European model.

Which EU weather forecast provider is best and most accurate? I want to move away from just googling the weather or the weather app on my phone.

Try Windy.com, it's got ECMWF data, among others.

ECMWF is the best which is available globally.

But often there are local models with are better for specific regions.

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

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

> I am not sure what to make if your question.

They are asking for a quantification of improvement. "better" predictions could range from "only experts notice" to "the daily/7 day weather is now noticeably more accurate for all citizens of Europe".

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 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 use windy.com for its 'compare models', the models can differ by ~2C sometimes

The difference in wind speeds can be quite significant, which greatly alters some forecasts.

The question is often when it will rain, not if it will rain.

They also feature that the IR hyperspectral measurement is new -- 1700 channels in IR for a telescope in GEO seems new to me, but I'm not sure what exists now in this space.

They say they hope to retrieve trace gases at that global scale (seemingly with 30 minute cadence), which I think would be new. Also, they seem to say that this spectral resolution would enable them to retrieve temperature and humidity as a function of height -- not just surface temperature and column-integrated water content ("humidity").

Aha, here's a nice link (https://www.ssec.wisc.edu/geo-ir-sounder/) on exactly this question, pointing out the NASA IR sounders that have existed for many years (AIRS). These instruments get vertically-resolved atmospheric information, but they are not at GEO so their coverage is different. This makes them less useful for NWP.

Replying very late, but with an actual answer.

It turns out that yes, better forecasts is a large part of what motivated the launch of this instrument.

High-spectral-resolution IR spectra at GEO allow estimation of vertically-resolved temperature and water vapor (over large spatial areas, at high temporal cadence), which are then assimilated. Forecasts and nowcasts thus improve.

These "spectra-to-get-temperature-and-water" measurements were pioneered by other instruments in LEO (e.g., NASA's AIRS, https://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/overview/), but LEO does not provide enough coverage to help forecasts.

To understand the benefits of GEO IR spectra, we do "OSSE's" (Observing System Simulation Experiments) to quantify how much improvement you get. You take a "Nature Run", make simulated observations (existing and proposed), and see if there is an improvement. (Since the Nature Run, which you made, provided ground truth, you can judge if there really was an improvement.)

Thankfully, many people have already done this. See: https://www.ssec.wisc.edu/geo-ir-sounder/osse/

In particular, looking at the figure there from Li et al., compare panels:

* (d) -- (Nature Run) - (existing data) ("CNTRL")

* (e) -- (Nature Run) - (existing data + GEO IR)

which both show differences between the Nature Run (NR) and the forecast.

The RMSE improvement (on a CONUS storm) is given as RMS of 0.55 (existing) versus 0.43 (with GEO IR), in degrees Kelvin. So that's 0.12 Kelvin or 0.22 Fahrenheit. Also, and probably more interestingly, the spatial pattern changes.

There are a lot of OSSE's reported on that page for these sounders. NASA is also conducting OSSE studies for a more ambitious multi-spacecraft observing system (https://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/decadal-surveys/decad...).

Studies like this (i.e., OSSEs like the ones above) are one of the main ways we decide how to build the next instruments -- what provides the most benefits vs. cost, which system parameters to push to improve and which are good enough.

Also check out the EUMETSAT site if you want more information on how the data is used:

https://www.eumetsat.int/features/see-earths-atmosphere-neve...

Congrats ESA! Those first images are pretty striking. It's pretty cool to see the contrast between the blue high altitude clouds and the red hot surface, particularly just below the Sahara.

>"Most engineers (including me) spent months grinding LeetCode ..."

I have not done it once (work in programming for 40+ years) as independent. Few times potential clients tried to play this game but I just simple refuse. On was surprised and asked why? My answer was - I have a track record of successful deliveries, here is big list of projects, emails and phone numbers to confirm. If you are going instead to rely on some tests to prove my abilities I have better things to do then be a schoolboy on exams.

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

Is there any info about the modulation/encoding/frequency? It would be great to have an open source decoder for RTL-SDR like we have for NOAA or METEOR.

The most surprising thing on this page for me was:

> The areas of least atmospheric humidity ... a large area of ‘dry’ atmosphere also covers part of the South Atlantic Ocean (centre of image).

This area is not that far south as to basically indicate the antarctic, and it is warm season in the southern hemisphere. I did not even think it would be possible to have a larger area of low humidity over a massive ocean like that.

With the massive budget cuts of the NOAA and DMSP, I am glad someone else can fill that gap.

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

I wonder if hobbyists would be able to pick up this data using some sort of RF capture device.

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

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.

I hate to worry everyone, but I think there might be some triangular chunks missing off the corners of our planet, someone should probably look into this.

(Specifically around 2, 5, and 10 o clock on the orientation of the images provided)

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

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

my weather app is still gonna tell me its raining while its not

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.

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