EUMETSAT and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) are preparing to exchange global observation data from ISRO’s Oceansat-2 and other satellites. The matter has been under discussion between the EUMETSAT Director-General, Dr. Lars Prahm, and the previous and current ISRO chairmen, Shri G. Madhavan Nair and Dr. K. Radhakrishnan, respectively, since 2009, and the data services are now expected to come to fruition in the near future. The data exchange will be a concrete result of the long-standing global coordination framework provided by the Coordination Group for Meteorological Satellites (CGMS).
CGMS, whose secretariat is run by EUMETSAT, provides a forum for the exchange of technical information on geostationary and polar-orbiting meteorological satellite systems and research and development missions. ISRO’s current missions are national but provide global observations of data transmitted to ground stations in India. However, users outside India are also interested in Indian data, which is highly relevant for their purposes.
The data from Oceansat-2 have been specifically requested by EUMETSAT’s Ocean and Sea Ice (OSI) Satellite Application Facility (SAF) and Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) SAF. Interested users include EUMETSAT Member States and the United States as well as the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).
In addition to the Oceansat-2 polar-orbiting satellite, EUMETSAT is planning cooperation with ISRO on the exchange of data from the ISRO-Centre National d’Etudes Spatiale (CNES, the French space agency) Satellite with ARgos and ALtimeter in Ka-band (SARAL) and Megha-Tropiques missions. ISRO already has access to data from EUMETSAT satellites through the EUMETCast data dissemination system.
The data exchange will be an important step in expanding the international cooperation between EUMETSAT, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and ISRO, taking advantage of all three organisation’s important role in Earth observation related to meteorological data.
