How to forecast the weather in 2040
I doubt any subject I put on this blog will be more relevant to you than the one I'm about to discuss. Weather satellites.
These spacecraft, along with the ones that relay our TV pictures and phone calls, probably provide the most recognisable and most appreciated services delivered to the citizen from orbit.
And in the next few days Europe will begin the long process of building its next-generation of meteorological satellites, to bring us even more detailed and more accurate forecasts.
This will take the form of an announcement by the (Esa) of the industrial team that will be tasked with constructing the spacecraft and their instruments.
The programme is a colossal one. In scale, it ranks alongside Europe's Galileo sat-nav project and its Gmes Earth observation programme.
At last year's , member states committed to spend just under a billion euros on MTG in the next few years. But that's just a fraction of it.
The weather satellite service in Europe is operated by another intergovernmental organisation - ; and it will spend more than double what Esa is putting into the project.
Very simply put, Esa - as a science and technology research organisation - will lead the development of two prototype MTGs. Eumetsat will operate them and pay for the four follow-up "production models".
If you watch the TV today in Europe and you see satellite images of clouds swirling across the continent, those pictures will have been acquired by the series of spacecraft - specifically .
These satellites sit . As they spin, their instruments scan the weather systems below, and provide (broadly speaking) an update every 15 minutes.
Two more MSGs are in the cupboard and will launch in the next two or three years, guaranteeing European satellite-borne weather data until at least the end of the next decade.
The plan is to have the first MTGs in orbit before 2020, in time for a seamless handover. The next generation will then run until 2040. Think about that. A decision on whether to take a brolly to work in 30 years' time will be shaped by the industrial decisions taken in the coming days.
The new spacecraft will be quite unlike their forebears. The MSGs, for example, are spin-stabilised and build up their images as they rotate across the field of view.
The MTG satellites will look more like standard telecommunications spacecraft. They will sit and stare at the Earth. Their image data will have a much higher resolution and will come down in a fraction of the time - in 2.5 minutes.
There will be many innovations but perhaps the two instruments of major note will be a Lightning Imager, which should give much earlier notice of electrical storms; and an Infrared Sounding Instrument which will detect the layers of moisture in the atmosphere long before they have developed into weather systems.
The sounding instrument should also give improved warning of extreme precipitation events, like the recent one at that saw about 25cm of water dumped on north-west England in just 24 hours.
Two consortia are competing to lead development of the prototype spacecraft. One is headed by EADS Astrium (Germany) and the other by Thales Alenia Space (France).
Germany and France committed a lot of money at the Esa ministerial last year to direct the project. Under the Esa "juste retour" principle of "what you put in, you get back", these two nations are guaranteed the lion's share of industrial work.
It was a smart move because whoever gets to build the prototypes will also get to build the four production models and the cost for those is borne, as I said, by Eumetsat members.
This illustrates one of the key frustrations often mentioned to me by UK industrialists and Earth observation scientists. While the UK will be paying hundreds of millions of euros into the MTG project through its Eumetsat membership, its industry is locked out of much of the satellite work because it put nothing into the Esa subscription.
There will be some sub-system work available for British companies to bid for, but if another, equally good offer is made by a firm in a country that did subscribe to the Esa part of MTG then the British outfit is likely to lose out.
UK industry will therefore be working hard to get contracts on the ground segment, that part of the system which controls the spacecraft and handles their data. This largely falls into the domain of Eumetsat and is not covered by Esa's "juste retour" principle.
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