Abstract
Along with telecommunications, meteorology is undoubtedly one of the most popular applications of satellites. Meteorological satellites allow not only to follow on a large scale the formation and evolution of cloud systems but also to monitor the characteristics that determine the conditions of weather: the pressure, the temperature, and humidity of the air, the direction, the speed, and the height of the winds. Today, we can know the weather forecasts with several days in advance and we can predict the occurrence of hurricanes and storms alerting threatened populations and activating the appropriate protections. It was on April 1, 1960, when the USA sent into space the first weather satellite, the TIROS 1. There followed in succession until 1965, nine other similar satellites, replaced first by the operational satellites Nimbus and ESSA and then by the series of ITOS and NOAA satellites, much more advanced and sophisticated than previous and equipped, in addition to the cameras, with many other sensors capable of conducting specific observational programs. The Soviets, after a long period of testing conducted under the Cosmos label, in 1967 launched the Meteor, the first of a long series of satellites that, after undergoing many evolutions, survives still today. In 1977, ESA, the European Space Agency, started the Meteosat program. The Meteosat, such as other similar satellites launched by major space nations, operates from a geostationary orbit which, from a height of 36,000 km, allows to control continuously an entire hemisphere of the Earth.
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Notes
- 1.
A geosynchronous satellite is a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, with an orbital period the same as the Earth's rotation period. Such a satellite returns to the same position in the sky after each sidereal day (23 h, 56 min, and 4.1 s), and over the course of a day traces out a path in the sky that is typically some form of analemma (a figure of eight). A special case of geosynchronous satellite is the geostationary satellite, which has a geostationary orbit—a circular geosynchronous orbit in the same plane as and 35,786 km above the Earth’s equator.
- 2.
The first color image of the disk of the Earth was taken by military satellite DODGE in July 1967.
- 3.
GARP was a fifteen-year (1967–1982) international research program led by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the International Council of Scientific Unions. It involved the coordination of a hundred ground stations, ships, platforms, and aircraft, and the satellites, six from the USA, two from the former URSS, one from Europe, and one from Japan. During the first year, data were distributed to 22 centers around the world. The result was a significant increase in knowledge and understanding of meteorological processes which made it possible to extend the forecasting period to seven days. The GARP organized several important field experiments including GARP Atlantic Tropical Experiment in 1974 and the Alpine Experiment (ALPEX) in 1982.
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Dicati, R. (2017). Meteorological Satellites. In: Stamping the Earth from Space. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20756-8_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20756-8_6
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