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

https://user.eumetsat.int/resources/user-guides/getting-star...

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

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://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)

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

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

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

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

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

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.)

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.

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.

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

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

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

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...

I am not sure what to make if your question.

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

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".

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

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.

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.

[0] https://supernova.eso.org/

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.

"Act in Space"

https://actinspace.org/

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

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.

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

- 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.

https://europeanspaceflight.com/

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

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.

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.

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

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

But: Meteosat is very famous for encrypting their stuff.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Europe having the best weather model is not remotely controversial to anyone familiar with the subject.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

> 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.