Since 1993, La Réunion Island is the Regional Specialized Meteorological Centre/Tropical Cyclones (RSMC/TC) for the Southwest Indian Ocean, including Mozambique Channel.

With the lack of conventional data and aircraft reconnaissance on the RSMC area of responsability, the monitoring of tropical cyclones is essentially based on satellite imagery. The technique developed by Dvorak is still used to analyse and estimate the intensity of a tropical disturbance.

However since a few years, data from a variety of satellite sensors are generally available in real-time on the Web. Products from microwaves sounders, microwaves imagers, scatterometers and satellite derived winds are considerably helpful to the cyclone forecasters at La Réunion, and different exemples illustrating the impact of these new data on the way to work at the RSMC will be shown.