EUMETSAT 40th anniversary

Dear Director-General Mr. Phil Evans, Distinguished Representatives of EUMETSAT Member States, colleagues from meteorological and satellite agencies around the world, 

Forty years ago, a group of European states made a decision that remains rare in the world of Earth observation: they built something together that none of them could have sustained alone. 

That founding choice is what I want to start with tonight. Because it is easy, forty years later, to look at a mature institution and forget that it began as a political decision, not a technical one. 

I came to my current role as a meteorologist from Argentina. My master's degree is from 1987 — one year after EUMETSAT was founded. Then – as is still the case today - the geostationary that supported weather forecasting observations across the Americas came from NOAA satellites, shared freely and openly with the world.  The Western Hemisphere  has benefited from entire that commitment  that reflects the very best of the WMO data-sharing tradition. 

But as my career evolved — from scientist, to professor, to director of Argentina's national meteorological service — I came to appreciate something that goes beyond data access: the particular value of what Europe had built with EUMETSAT. Thirty member states making collective decisions about what to observe and why. Sharing the cost of building and sustaining the system. 
Jointly governing its continuity across political cycles and budget pressures. Collectively investing in the capacity of their meteorological services to use what the satellites provide. 

That combination — collective decision, collective investment, collective prioritization, collective capacity development — is what makes EUMETSAT distinctive worldwide. Systems that are collectively owned tend to be collectively defended. Tonight, forty years in, that defense has clearly held. 

Now let me speak as a scientist from the Southern Hemisphere. 

When I was teaching numerical weather prediction at the University of Buenos Aires, there was a fact that every student had to confront: a 3-day forecast for the Northern Hemisphere in 1985 was of equivalent quality to a three day forecast for the Southern Hemisphere in 1998. Thirteen years of forecast skill separated the two hemispheres — not because the atmosphere behaves differently, but because of the lack of observations. That gap began to close at the start of this century, driven primarily by the 
improved assimilation of satellite radiance data into global models. Polar-orbiting satellites, including MetOp, made a 
measurable and documented contribution to that convergence. 

Satellites were responsible for closing part of that gap, but not all of it. The surface observation network — weather stations, radiosondes, ocean buoys — remains critically uneven across large parts of the world. WMO works every day to address this. And the Systematic Observations Financing Facility — SOFF — exists precisely because this gap constrains global forecast quality, and closing it requires sustained international financing that many countries cannot provide alone. The honest scientific picture is one of complementarity: satellites provide global coverage and continuity; surface networks provide the ground truth against which satellite data is calibrated and validated. One without the other leaves the system incomplete. I want to recognize explicitly that EUMETSAT has been a consistent voice for the value of in-situ data. That intellectual honesty is part of what makes this institution trustworthy. 

Before continuous geostationary coverage, a convective system developing over the ocean was largely invisible until it reached land. With geostationary imagery, you could watch the convection organize in real time. The same applies to fires, volcanic eruptions, the transport of Saharan dust, and air quality across borders. 

With Meteosat Third Generation a Lightning Imager now provides continuous lightning detection, substantially improving nowcasting of rapidly developing storms. 

EUMETSAT began as a geostationary meteorological operator. Today it also operates MetOp polar-orbiting satellites — jointly with ESA — and under the Copernicus programme. Its mandate has grown from weather observation to encompass climate monitoring, ocean observation, land surface conditions and the tracking of Earth system variables across decades. 

Essentially, we are moving from monitoring to forecasting, and from some components of the earth system to the whole system. 

That expansion means that EUMETSAT's member states chose, repeatedly, to invest in questions beyond weather. The multi-decadal record we now have — as for example that of Arctic sea ice extent — exists because previous generations placed 
the right instruments, not just more instruments. That record is part of global public good. 

It underpins the scientific assessments that inform climate negotiations. It is irreplaceable, and is how WMO is evolving its own Earth system approach. 

WMO coordinates the global architecture within which EUMETSAT operates, and the mechanism that makes that coordination function is CGMS — the Coordination Group for Meteorological Satellites — whose Secretariat EUMETSAT hosts here in Darmstadt. 

CGMS is where sovereign space agencies — NASA, JAXA, CMA, ISRO, EUMETSAT, and others — sit at the same table, agree on what the global constellation needs to do collectively, and track whether those commitments are being met. Critically, this coordination is not conducted in isolation from those who depend on it: National Meteorological and Hydrological Services, regional bodies, and the broader user community participate in defining requirements, assessing gaps, and shaping the evolution of 
the system. 

At the sixteenth Consultative Meeting on High-Level Policy on Satellite Matters, held at WMO Headquarters this past March, space agencies reaffirmed their support for WIGOS Vision 2050 as a guiding framework for long-term planning and called on WMO to develop an implementation strategy for that vision. 

I am accepting that call publicly, tonight. 

WIGOS Vision 2050 rests on three priorities directly relevant to this community. 

First: Long-term continuity. The decisions being made now — about MTG successor systems, funding across budget cycles, and overlap periods — will determine what data is available in 2035, 2045, and 2050. A gap in the observational record, once it occurs, cannot be recovered. Sustaining and extending the multidecadal record already built is a commitment to leaving 
future generations the tools they will need to understand the planet they have inherited. 

Second: Equity in utilization.  The gap between that coverage and its current utilization is not a satellite problem — it is a problem of bandwidth, computing infrastructure, and trained personnel. 

EUMETSAT has invested concretely in closing that gap, particularly in Africa as METEOSAT covers this continent more completely than any other geostationary operator's primary mission. 

Since the beginning of this decade alone, EUMETSAT and its partners have trained close to 2,000 participants across Africa in satellite meteorology, forecasting, nowcasting, and climate applications — delivered in close cooperation with the WMO Virtual Laboratory network and our African Regional Training Centres. Beyond training, other initiatives, funded by the European Union and implemented with African institutions, are ensuring that countries across the continent can access and operationally use Meteosat Third Generation services. This is the right model: not just placing instruments in orbit, but building the expertise on the ground to turn those observations into forecasts, early warnings, and climate services that reach people. 

But the CM-16 conclusions are direct: significant gaps remain in achieving Early Warnings for All objectives, including in satellite data utilization. There is more to do, and I am asking EUMETSAT to deepen this commitment with us. 

Third: Integration between space-based and Earth based systems. Satellite calibration depends on Earth based reference measurements. Local forecasting depends on surface observations satellites cannot replace. 

Investing in one component without the other weakens both. 

Forty years from now, someone will give a speech at EUMETSAT's eightieth anniversary. What they will be able to say depends substantially on decisions made in the next decade — on funding commitments, on closing the equity gap in data utilization, on protecting the radio frequency spectrum that passive sensors depend on, and on treating the integration of space- and surface-based systems as the shared responsibility it is. 

Those are political decisions, requiring engagement at the level of heads of agencies and ministers. 

What EUMETSAT has built is a proof of concept for something the world still struggles to do: sustain cooperation across borders and budget cycles in service of a shared scientific and humanitarian purpose. 

Every morning, when a forecast model assimilates satellite radiance data and turns it into a warning that reaches a community that has never heard of Darmstadt — that is this cooperation making its argument. Quietly. Daily. Incontrovertibly. 

WMO is proud to be part of that effort. We look forward to the decades ahead. 

Thank you.