Atmospheric Winds – EUMETSAT Climate Data Records from Polar and Geostationary Satellite Data

The Earth's climate system is intricately influenced by fluctuating atmospheric circulation patterns, of which can be characterised from the wind field. Accurate and comprehensive monitoring of the wind is essential for understanding climate dynamics, forecasting weather events, and assessing long-term climate changes.

Since the launch of its first generation satellite, EUMETSAT developed its own unique algorithms to derive Atmospheric Motion Vectors (AMVs) in real time for weather forecasting. The algorithms tracks the movement of clouds and water vapour structures in satellite images acquired by instruments on-board satellites operated in polar and geostationary orbits.

AMV is one of the Essential Climate Variables (ECV) defined in the framework of the Global Climate Observing System, which can be obtained from satellite observations and CDRs and are suitable for climate monitoring of the atmosphere, particularly for atmospheric dynamics variability and change.

EUMETSAT has an extensive archive of satellite imagery from decades of space missions, in particular from all imaging instruments on the Meteosat satellites and the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHHR) deployed on the NOAA and EUMETSAT polar orbiting weather satellites. This archive provides a robust data source for meteorological and climate research and enables the production of AMV Climate Data Records (CDRs). To enable AMV data records with a minimum of artefacts, EUMETSAT produces well-characterised Fundamental Data Records (FDR) for these instrument data using a rigorous quality control followed by instrument re- and cross-calibrations (Meteosat only). The FDRs have been used in a project for the Copernicus Climate Change Service to produce several AMV CDRs that have been comprehensively validated.

The EUMETSAT AMV CDRs now cover more than four decades starting from the late 1970s. There temporal scope will be extended further into the past by including data from historical imagers such as the Temperature-Humidity Infrared Radiometer aboard Nimbus satellites from 1970 to 1994. Of course, future generations of imagers such as the Flexible Combined Imager on the Meteosat Thord Generation satellites and METImage on the EUMETSAT Polar System Second Generation satellites will also extend the time series into the future for two more decades.

The presentation will demonstrate quality of existing EUMETSAT AMV CDRs and spotlight their potential utility across various domains. In addition, ongoing developments regarding the historical observations will be shown.