ESA has done a lot of good for public benefit with the Sentinel-1/2 missions. I happen to work with remote sensing and Sentinel data has been my entry point to the field.
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.
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 :)
Most weather data isn't generally available by easy to query REST API's (at least not at the original sources). One side project I had I wanted to use NOMADs data, and it was quite a grind downloading and processing the raw datasets into something usable at an application level (or viable to expose via an API).
Well, at least in my experience with EU projects, they tend to be much more restrictive with data sharing than equivalent US institutions: e.g. a lot of paid EUMET data has publicly available NOAA equivalents - though usually of worse quality.
It is not an EU project. It is an ESA and EUMETSAT project. Neither is an EU organisation. Both have multiple non-EU members, and I do not think all EU countries are members of either.
Definitely not in anything like realtime, maybe an archive. There's a licence fee of 8000EUR/yr to access real-time EUMETSAT data. Welcome to Europe, where you pay for everything twice.
There's an 8k license for "recommended" (not "core", which is free under CC-BY-4.0 for all purposes) data if you are a service provider or broadcaster:
Hah! I don't believe this for a second. No, you need the 8k, a business entity (at the very least), five different licenses of some sort, and then some form of accreditation.
This data is from the third generation of Meteosats, which are the European meteorological satellites. A lot like GOES in the north-America. The main improvement is really significant improvement in resolution. The resolution is, depending on the channel, 9 times better than in the second generation. The main improvement in forecasting comes due to better information in the initial condition of the numerical weather prediction, but it is hard to quantify in advance. I'd be surprised if MAE, over the 15 days the prediction spans, would improve more than 0.1 C, if we talk about the raw prediction.
There are plenty of things that this data is used for, but I would say that improved nowcast of cloud coverage, and energy production related parameters are likely to benefit most from the improvement in resolution.
I was curious but it’s surprisingly hard to find info. These guys [1] are pretty stoked about “nowcasting”—which seems to be on sub-10-minute timescales to issue local severe weather warnings and such. It appears current sounders don’t scan as often.
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.
This is an improvement as it provides better data and has nothing to do with the models that are used in a separate step to forcast anything. But that is said in the article as well, with the satellite being the first hyperspectral view on Europe and North Africa.
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".
I recently met a European space startup founder and was surprised to learn how much space innovation is happening in Europe with ESA. Europe wants to become less depended on SpaceX and NASA, and is heavily investing there. More funding + strong aerospace programs at universities like TU Munich has led to companies like ISAR Aerospace (SpaceX competitor), which is great to see.
I work in the domain, and it is true that many of the startups will almost entirely use free data, like from the sentinel satellites via ESA. It really lowers the barriers to entry, if you have a nice idea.
EDIT:
We actually work close with one startup that sprung out from academia. The founders wrote their masters thesis on object detection and pattern recognition using sentinel imaging. They had basically one product: to detect certain objects. After a couple of years they had gotten a handful of customers (basically they'd receive coordinates to some are of interest, and then tasked with trying to detect something), which afforded them to purchase commercial data (from other types of sensors) for building more robust systems. This in turn grew their customer bas, and they started adding products.
Then they were acquired by one of the largest private space companies.
But, in any case, it all started with access to free data. Would they have started a company like this, if they hadn't had access to the data from ESA? Who knows, but it made it all much easier. And they were able to completely bootstrap the company.
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.
At this point, calling ISAR a competitor to SpaceX feels a bit like calling Pringles a competitor to TSMC, but it's certainly good to see some movement happening.
maiaspace (https://www.maia-space.com/) also intends to compete with SpaceX and is an Ariane spin-off, they're meant to do their first launch this year and start putting satellites in LEO in 27
There is also a Spanish company which according to them, they were the first private European company to reach space with their rocket: https://www.pldspace.com/en/
There were once about 300 small rocket companies. About 250 of them are dead by by now.
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.
Except of course the Ariane chockhold never existed for small rockets. Because Vega exists. And for large rockets the "chokehold" very much continues to exist and shows absolutely zero evidence of going away in the next decade.
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.
Can you show some actual evidence of that? Because evidence actually shows that commercial growth in the US outpaces Europe by a gigantic degree. The traditional European companies like Airbus has made lots of loses. European companies are not even competing in the LEO race to any serious degree.
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.
- Top talent doesn't even want to move to the US anymore either.
I mean really I'm super progressive and LGBTIQ+ aligned. I'm not even flying there for a meeting anymore, sorry. My employer is European and I'm part of the inclusion team, they are understanding me refusing US travel.
I hate to worry everyone, but I think there might be some triangular chunks missing off the corners of our planet, someone should probably look into this.
(Specifically around 2, 5, and 10 o clock on the orientation of the images provided)
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.
Picking it up is no problem for some specialists in the (ham) radio scene. They are mastering X- and S-band stuff so good that even the NASA asked them to join in some observations in the past.
But: Meteosat is very famous for encrypting their stuff.
ESA has done a lot of good for public benefit with the Sentinel-1/2 missions. I happen to work with remote sensing and Sentinel data has been my entry point to the field.
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.
ADM-Aeolus was a stellar project too.
Europe Is back on the map. It´s going slow but steady. Hope they involve community in their tech projects.
Europe was always great in weather observation from space.
Europe has always been #1 in weather forecast.
Would the data from this satellite be freely available to the public? I couldn't see anything obvious
As far as I can tell, they say: "Mission control and data distribution are managed by EUMETSAT." They have published their own blog post here: https://www.eumetsat.int/features/see-earths-atmosphere-neve...
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://user.eumetsat.int/api-definitions/data-store-downloa...
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Most weather data isn't generally available by easy to query REST API's (at least not at the original sources). One side project I had I wanted to use NOMADs data, and it was quite a grind downloading and processing the raw datasets into something usable at an application level (or viable to expose via an API).
As most EU projects yes. There was test data released last year to get you started.
https://user.eumetsat.int/resources/user-guides/getting-star...
Well, at least in my experience with EU projects, they tend to be much more restrictive with data sharing than equivalent US institutions: e.g. a lot of paid EUMET data has publicly available NOAA equivalents - though usually of worse quality.
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It is not an EU project. It is an ESA and EUMETSAT project. Neither is an EU organisation. Both have multiple non-EU members, and I do not think all EU countries are members of either.
There was a good CCC talk on pulling images from weather sats (and data from other satellites) - https://youtu.be/fM5w7bFNvWI?si=Dq6S6nYOE_frAd7b
It's been done before, but this was a great talk imo.
Yes, it will be freely available to the public
I guess you will be able to access the data with copernicus (usually thy even provide raw L0 data)
If they'll publish it through Copernicus, it'll probably show up here:
https://browser.dataspace.copernicus.eu/
Definitely not in anything like realtime, maybe an archive. There's a licence fee of 8000EUR/yr to access real-time EUMETSAT data. Welcome to Europe, where you pay for everything twice.
There's an 8k license for "recommended" (not "core", which is free under CC-BY-4.0 for all purposes) data if you are a service provider or broadcaster:
https://user.eumetsat.int/resources/user-guides/data-registr...
There are also fees in some other circumstances, but not for "personal, educational, research" use.
Hah! I don't believe this for a second. No, you need the 8k, a business entity (at the very least), five different licenses of some sort, and then some form of accreditation.
Does anyone know what are we talking about in practice in terms of weather forecast prediction improvement? Like MAE/RMSE
This data is from the third generation of Meteosats, which are the European meteorological satellites. A lot like GOES in the north-America. The main improvement is really significant improvement in resolution. The resolution is, depending on the channel, 9 times better than in the second generation. The main improvement in forecasting comes due to better information in the initial condition of the numerical weather prediction, but it is hard to quantify in advance. I'd be surprised if MAE, over the 15 days the prediction spans, would improve more than 0.1 C, if we talk about the raw prediction. There are plenty of things that this data is used for, but I would say that improved nowcast of cloud coverage, and energy production related parameters are likely to benefit most from the improvement in resolution.
I use windy.com for its 'compare models', the models can differ by ~2C sometimes
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I was curious but it’s surprisingly hard to find info. These guys [1] are pretty stoked about “nowcasting”—which seems to be on sub-10-minute timescales to issue local severe weather warnings and such. It appears current sounders don’t scan as often.
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...
This is an improvement as it provides better data and has nothing to do with the models that are used in a separate step to forcast anything. But that is said in the article as well, with the satellite being the first hyperspectral view on Europe and North Africa.
I am not sure what to make if your question.
> I am not sure what to make if your question.
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".
Ultimately better data will lead to and enable better models and forecasts, but I'm sure it's not super easy to put a number to that.
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With the massive budget cuts of the NOAA and DMSP, I am glad someone else can fill that gap.
Also check out the EUMETSAT site if you want more information on how the data is used:
https://www.eumetsat.int/features/see-earths-atmosphere-neve...
I recently met a European space startup founder and was surprised to learn how much space innovation is happening in Europe with ESA. Europe wants to become less depended on SpaceX and NASA, and is heavily investing there. More funding + strong aerospace programs at universities like TU Munich has led to companies like ISAR Aerospace (SpaceX competitor), which is great to see.
I work in the domain, and it is true that many of the startups will almost entirely use free data, like from the sentinel satellites via ESA. It really lowers the barriers to entry, if you have a nice idea.
EDIT:
We actually work close with one startup that sprung out from academia. The founders wrote their masters thesis on object detection and pattern recognition using sentinel imaging. They had basically one product: to detect certain objects. After a couple of years they had gotten a handful of customers (basically they'd receive coordinates to some are of interest, and then tasked with trying to detect something), which afforded them to purchase commercial data (from other types of sensors) for building more robust systems. This in turn grew their customer bas, and they started adding products.
Then they were acquired by one of the largest private space companies.
But, in any case, it all started with access to free data. Would they have started a company like this, if they hadn't had access to the data from ESA? Who knows, but it made it all much easier. And they were able to completely bootstrap the company.
If you are ever in Munich and want to find out more, be sure to visit the ESO Supernova[0].
[0] https://supernova.eso.org/
definitely worth a visit. loved the exhibition about the Atacama desert telescopes. especially great for kids.
There are even Hackathons from ESA:
"Act in Space"
https://actinspace.org/
I worked at one of the hosts of one these events years ago - very intersting people there!
Very cool!
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.
For sure, it's booming in the current climate. My biggest bet for 2026 is Eutelsat which is the biggest star link competitor.
At this point, calling ISAR a competitor to SpaceX feels a bit like calling Pringles a competitor to TSMC, but it's certainly good to see some movement happening.
maiaspace (https://www.maia-space.com/) also intends to compete with SpaceX and is an Ariane spin-off, they're meant to do their first launch this year and start putting satellites in LEO in 27
There is also a Spanish company which according to them, they were the first private European company to reach space with their rocket: https://www.pldspace.com/en/
There were once about 300 small rocket companies. About 250 of them are dead by by now.
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.
there's a pretty great blog following european space news
https://europeanspaceflight.com/
A lot has been happening in recent years with launchers once ESA broke the Ariane "chokehold".
Except of course the Ariane chockhold never existed for small rockets. Because Vega exists. And for large rockets the "chokehold" very much continues to exist and shows absolutely zero evidence of going away in the next decade.
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.
Europe is behind in launchers, but the stuff they send up is top-notch.
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
Can you show some actual evidence of that? Because evidence actually shows that commercial growth in the US outpaces Europe by a gigantic degree. The traditional European companies like Airbus has made lots of loses. European companies are not even competing in the LEO race to any serious degree.
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.
The Trump administration is probably helping quite a bit on two fronts here:
- 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.
- Top talent doesn't even want to move to the US anymore either.
I mean really I'm super progressive and LGBTIQ+ aligned. I'm not even flying there for a meeting anymore, sorry. My employer is European and I'm part of the inclusion team, they are understanding me refusing US travel.
I hate to worry everyone, but I think there might be some triangular chunks missing off the corners of our planet, someone should probably look into this.
(Specifically around 2, 5, and 10 o clock on the orientation of the images provided)
Don't worry, it's just a few shadows of the Vogon Construction fleet: https://scifi.fandom.com/wiki/Vogon_Constructor_Fleet
I see this comment being downvoted, but it made me giggle, thanks :)
>"Most engineers (including me) spent months grinding LeetCode ..."
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.
(Wrong thread; think you meant to post this on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46809069.)
I wonder if hobbyists would be able to pick up this data using some sort of RF capture device.
Picking it up is no problem for some specialists in the (ham) radio scene. They are mastering X- and S-band stuff so good that even the NASA asked them to join in some observations in the past.
But: Meteosat is very famous for encrypting their stuff.
See my comment above re a CCC.de video from 38C3.
my weather app is still gonna tell me its raining while its not
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