The first METEOSAT Second Generation satellite will come into service in 2001. It will acquire image data in 12 spectral channels with a total data volume of 265 Mbytes every 15 minutes. These data are received, processed, and distributed by the EUMETSAT Ground Segment in real-time. The Ground Segment architecture is composed of blocks of grouped functionality called facilities. The Image Proce...

Reliable data on circumsolar radiation, which is caused by scattering of sunlight by cloud or aerosol particles, is becoming more and more important for the resource assessment and design of concentrating solar technologies (CSTs). However, measuring circumsolar radiation is demanding and only very limited data sets are available. As a step to bridge this gap, a method was developed which allow...

Since 1972, satellite remote sensing of the environment has been dominated by polar-orbiting sensors providing useful data for monitoring the earth’s natural resources. However their observation and monitoring capacity are inhibited by daily to monthly looks for any given ground surface which often is obscured by frequent and persistent cloud cover creating large gaps in time series measurement...

—HelioClim-3 is a database containing surface solar irradiance assessed every 15 min from images taken by the Meteosat series of satellites since 2004. It covers Europe, Africa and Atlantic Ocean. In average, comparison with hourly measurements made in meteorological stations yields a correlation coefficient greater than 0.9, a relative root mean square error (rRMSE) around 20% of the mean meas...

Meteosat infra-red imagery for the Great Storm of October 1987 is analysed to show a series of very shallow arc-shaped and smaller chevron-shaped cloud features that were associated with damaging surface winds in the dry-slot region of this extra-tropical cyclone. Hypotheses are presented that attribute these low-level cloud features to boundary-layer convergence lines ahead of wind maxima asso...

A nonlinear forecasting method based on the reconstruction of a chaotic strange attractor from about 1.5 years of cloud absorption data obtained from half-hourly Meteosat infrared images was used to predict the behavior of the time series 24 h in advance. The forecast values are then used by a meteorological model for daily prediction of plume transport from the As Pontes 1400-MW power plant in...