August 28, 2012 Ten years of Meteosat Second Generation When the
first Meteosat Second Generation satellite, Meteosat-8, was
launched on 28 August 2002 it heralded a new era of discovery
for meteorologists. It became fully operational at 0 degree
longitude at the equator on 19 January 2004 and, in addition to
providing weather information in much more detail, it provided
information on phenomena which had never been considered before.
Meteosat-8 introduced a new instrument — SEVIRI (Spinning
Enhanced Visible & Infrared Imager), the world’s best weather
imager in geostationary orbit. This powerful instrument provided
an improvement of image resolution in the visible spectrum, to 1
km from 2.5 km, and in the infrared, to 3 km from 5 km, and had
multi-spectral imagery. This meant the satellite was suddenly
showing features such as fog boundaries. It could be used to
track elements such as volcanic ash — particularly useful during
the Icelandic volcano eruptions of 2010 and 2011. SEVIRI was
able to supply, at int