Gossip fans will appreciate more accurate weather reports. Scientists and forecasters are downright enthusiastic. The very first of Europe’s second-generation weather satellites, MetOp-SG to give it its little name, is being assembled in the Airbus Defense & Space (ADS) clean rooms and is scheduled for launch “in October or November 2024”. No longer by a Russian Soyuz launch vehicle, but by an Ariane 6 given the new international context.
“It will be one of the most precise missions ever launched to study the atmosphere,” says Cyril Crevoisier, CNRS research director at the Dynamic Meteorology Laboratory (LMB) in Toulouse. Indeed, although the same infrared techniques are used to sound out the atmosphere, “an area in which the French excel”, it is simply announced as “twice as efficient” and precise as the first satellite wave. Thanks in particular to the new generation (NG) of its main instrument – IASI, for Infrared Atmospheric Interferometer – “a jewel of technology” developed by CNES and Airbus engineers and currently being integrated at ADS in Toulouse.
Embedded in the satellite, IASI-NG will enable the entire Earth’s atmosphere to be surveyed twice every 24 hours from top to bottom in swaths 2,400 km long and 100 km wide. “By providing parameters such as temperature or water vapor columns, it will feed the Météo-France forecast models and improve them for several days,” points out François Bermudo, project manager at CNES. But the instrument will also be able to more precisely track polluting atmospheric molecules. “Like ammonia in an industrial fire,” says Cathy Clerbaux of the Atmospheres and Space Observations Laboratory (Latmos). Or the ash from volcanic eruptions.
Dormant for 15 years
Climatologists like Cyril Crevoisier will be able to study climate change over the long term using “extremely weak temperature signals, sometimes on the order of hundredths of a degree.” “From the launch of the first IASI in 2006 to the last IASI-NG planned for 2038, we will have a 50-year program of observing the atmosphere with the same type of instrument. In other words, a homogeneity of the data,” explains the researcher.
Apart from the expected performance, the IASI-NG has the originality of being manufactured in three copies in succession for three second generation MetOp satellites operated by the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (Eumetsat). So the last instrument will sleep for 15 years waiting for its flight.