The European geostationary satellite Meteosat will within roughly a year be replaced by Meteosat Second Generation (MSG). The key Meteosat products that will also be continued with MSG are the Atmospheric Motion Vector (AMV) fields. MSG will provide full globe imagery data every 15 min. with a sampling distance of 3 km that will have positive impact on the quality of the derived vectors. Furthermore MSG will observe the atmosphere in several spectral bands; amongst others two water vapor absorption channels at 6.3 and 7.2 µm and a CO₂ absorption channel. These channels will for the first time operationally enable the application of the IR/WV and IR/CO₂ ratioing methodologies simultaneously, thus providing more accurate estimates of the cloud heights. Further new channels like the 3.9 µm channel and High Resolution Visible channel at 1 km resolution are expected to improve especially the tracking of low-level clouds.

The new capabilities of MSG have also initiated the development of a new generation of AMV retrieval algorithms. This paper will present the MSG AMV extraction scheme especially high-lighting the changes with respect to the current Meteosat AMV scheme and the expected areas of improvements. Results demonstrating the capabilities of the new AMV retrieval scheme with data from existing geostationary satellites are also presented.