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Meteosat satellites

These satellites are geostationnary, i.e. they operate in equatorial orbits at an altitude of 35,790 kilometers above the surface of Earth. For more information on Meteosat satellites, go the corresponding wikipedia page.

• Meteosat historic
• MSG-2 and Meteosat-7 views from space
• MSG-2 resolution

Meteosat historic

	Period	Temporal resolution	Spatial resolution (at Nadir) and number of channels	Comments
Meteosat-1	[1977;1979]	30 min	2.5 km (for the channel VIS/HRV) and 5 km (for the IR and the WV channels)
Meteosat-2	[1981;1991]
Meteosat-3	[1988;1995]
Meteosat-4	[1989;1995]
Meteosat-5	[1991;2005]			Current location: 63° East. This satellite was relocated at this location on July 1st 1998 for the study of the Indian Ocean in the framework of the IODC service (Indian Ocean Data Coverage). Meteosat-7 replaced Meteosat-5 as the operational IODC satellite on Feb 6th 2007. link to the IODC - Eumetsat page.
Meteosat-6	[1993;2006]			Current location: 67° East. Backup in the Meteosat-7 IODC service.
Meteosat-7	[1997;2013]			Current location: 57.5° East. Current operational IODC satellite.
Meteosat-8 or MSG-1	[2004;...]	15 min	1 km (for HRV) and 3 km (2 VIS, 1NIR, 6 IR and 2 WV)	Current location: 9.5° East. Backup for MSG-2.
Meteosat-9 or MSG-2	[2006;...]			Current location: 0°. Name of the imager: SEVIRI.
MSG-3 (futur)	[2015;...]	10 min	500 m

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MSG-2 and Meteosat-7 views from space

View from MSG-2 (0°)	View from Meteosat-7 (57° East)

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MSG-2 resolution

Current satellite in the Meteosat satellites series : Meteosat-9 or Meteosat Second Generation-2 (MSG-2). A pixel of the MSG satellite image corresponds to an area on the earth surface which depends on the latitude and longitude of the geographical point shown in the pixel. Let:   Rt be the radius of the earth (Rt ≈ 6378 km)   lat the latitude in radians   lon the longitude in radians   δlat the variation in latitude seen by the MSG pixel, in radians   δlon is the same for the longitude    The resolution in the north/south direction (Rns) and the resolution in the west/east direction are given by:   Rns = Rt * δlat   Rwe = Rt * δlon * cos(latmean)

Resolution of MSG-2. The center is (lat, lon) = (0°,0°), and the resolution is decreasing as we moved away from this point. The resolution ranges from 3 km near Nadir, to more than 12 km on the edges of the planet. Click here to magnify the image.

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