Europe’s next-generation weather satellite sends back first images

2026-01-297:0770899www.esa.int

The first images from the Meteosat Third Generation-Sounder satellite have been shared at the European Space Conference in Brussels, showing how the mission will provide data on temperature and…

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27/01/2026 9718 views 43 likes

The first images from the Meteosat Third Generation-Sounder satellite have been shared at the European Space Conference in Brussels, showing how the mission will provide data on temperature and humidity, for more accurate weather forecasting over Europe and northern Africa.

The images from Meteosat Third Generation-Sounder (MTG-S) show a full-disc image of Earth as seen from geostationary orbit, about 36 000 km above Earth’s surface. These images were captured on 15 November 2025 by the satellite’s Infrared Sounder instrument.

In the ‘temperature’ image (below), the Infrared Sounder used a long-wave infrared channel, which measured Earth’s surface temperature as well as the temperature at the top of clouds. Dark red corresponds to high temperatures, mainly on the warmer land surfaces, while blue corresponds to lower temperatures, typically on the top of clouds.

As would be expected, most of the warmest (dark red) areas in this image are on the continents of Africa and South America. In the top-centre of the image, the outline of the coast of western Africa is clearly visible in dark red, with the Cape Verde peninsula, home to Senegal’s capital Dakar, visible as among the warmest areas in this image. In the bottom-right of the image, the western coast of Namibia and South Africa are also visible in red beneath a swirl of cold cloud shown in blue, while the northeast coast of Brazil is visible in dark red on the left of the image.

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MTG-S1 and Copernicus Sentinel-4 mission highlights
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Comments

  • By maciejzj 2026-01-2914:123 reply

    ESA has done a lot of good for public benefit with the Sentinel-1/2 missions. I happen to work with remote sensing and Sentinel data has been my entry point to the field.

    I hope that ESA keeps pushing forward even more. I am afraid that although Sentinel missions are great, ESA projects are a bit demo-like and limited in scope. Europe should focus on scaling up and applying the tech, not just proving that ambitious projects are possible for their own sake.

    • By saubeidl 2026-01-2915:381 reply

      Don't forget about Euclid, giving us by far the most in-depth view of our universe!

      Check out their video on what kind of data it unlocks if you have five minutes and want to get your mind blown. https://youtube.com/watch?v=rXCBFlIpvfQ

      • By dylan604 2026-01-2916:02

        Don't forget terrestrial observing from the ESO with ALMA, VLT, and the under construction ELT down in Chile.

        Edit: If you watch the Euclid link above, please don't make the mistake I did and let the player auto select the crappy 720p50 version. Jump up to the 2160p version. It is more than worth it. But as advertised, if you are not impressed with Euclid's imagery after viewing the video, you must be dead.

    • By Levitating 2026-01-3022:311 reply

      > ESA projects are a bit demo-like and limited in scope

      I am kind of confused by that statement, what more would you expect from the Copernicus Programme? Isn't it a technical improvements over NASA's LANDSAT programme?

      • By maciejzj 2026-02-0211:48

        I don't mean "demo-like" in terms of poor technology. I meant that this technology doesn't yield products or services with global scales to an extent it happens in the US. Google Maps successfully uses both LANDSAT and Sentinel imagery. This is the wider problem of European failure to build companies/systems on top of technology.

    • By NoiseBert69 2026-01-2915:18

      ADM-Aeolus was a stellar project too.

  • By cyclotron3k 2026-01-299:1010 reply

    Would the data from this satellite be freely available to the public? I couldn't see anything obvious

    • By beklein 2026-01-299:392 reply

      As far as I can tell, they say: "Mission control and data distribution are managed by EUMETSAT." They have published their own blog post here: https://www.eumetsat.int/features/see-earths-atmosphere-neve...

      There they say that: "Observations made by MTG-S1 will feed into data products that support national weather services …". So I guess there will be no simple, publicly available REST API or so... but if anybody finds anything, let us know here :)

        • By jahller 2026-01-299:552 reply

          nice find. so you need a client_id to access the API

          • By Alexander-Barth 2026-01-2921:37

            For the datasets, I tried to access (like the full disc image in visible wavelength, MTG 0 degree), it is sufficient to register at eumetsat to get a username and password. The eumdac python tool is probably the easiest way to access the data:

            https://pypi.org/project/eumdac/

            (If you do not want to use python, the --debug option is quite useful to see exactly the request made. The output is either some JSON metadata or a large zip with the netcdf data)

          • By jonnybgood 2026-01-2921:33

            Read the data store user guide. You have to register.

      • By davedx 2026-01-2910:282 reply

        Most weather data isn't generally available by easy to query REST API's (at least not at the original sources). One side project I had I wanted to use NOMADs data, and it was quite a grind downloading and processing the raw datasets into something usable at an application level (or viable to expose via an API).

        • By Gigachad 2026-01-2922:00

          That’s why you have service/products that have the sole purpose of taking all these region specific data sources and processing them in to a generic json api.

          The government orgs probably do it intentionally so they don’t have ten million devices pinging their servers to update weather widgets.

        • By mitstake 2026-01-307:16

          Check out open-meteo. They’ve got pretty extensive historical and forecast weather apis in easy to consume formats. https://open-meteo.com/en/features#available_apis

    • By neop1x 2026-01-309:35

      EU citizens can get free access to it via Eumetcast DVB-S service for non-commercial use. A registration, an off-the-shelf DVB-S data receiver, a satellite dish and their decryption USB key is required. FOSS software like Satpy is available for processing those radiometric data. More info: https://user.eumetsat.int/resources/user-guides/eumet-cast-e...

    • By jandrewrogers 2026-01-2916:163 reply

      Unlikely. EU countries are consistently restrictive about access to this kind of data. Even when it is available, it often has odd restrictive licensing. This is an area where the US, with its liberal data access policies, is far ahead of Europe.

      Something else to keep in mind is that the data products are extremely large. It would be expensive to give the public access. I used to host these types of data sets for EU countries. The workload just from authorized users is resource intensive, it doesn't scale cheaply. (I once woke up to find a metaphorical smoking crater where my server racks were because an authorized user shared his credentials with a few friends overnight.)

      • By mulcyber 2026-01-2916:391 reply

        I don't know what you mean.

        Data from the Copernicus program has always been fully available, served with a nice web UI, API for both near real time data and archives.

        It's the best source of open satellite data by far.

        As for the licensing, I never actually looked it up, so maybe you're right.

        • By jandrewrogers 2026-01-2918:171 reply

          There are two aspects to this.

          The licensing commonly restricts you to small hobbyist use cases. There are typically restrictions on use of data, the amount of data, and retention of data. I've never looked at Copernicus data before but it appears to have the same kinds of restrictions. This is the licensing equivalent of "source available" rather than true "open source". Hopefully they are improving on this front.

          While the data may be available in theory, no one ever invests in the data infrastructure that would allow people to access it in practice. They always have a nice website and API but it is like trying to watch Youtube over a dial-up modem. Usable access is reserved for researchers with an approved use case.

          The US government does an unusually good job at both of these in my experience. Even when US public data sets that are not readily available online, you have to contact someone, it is usually for good reason. For example, because they are multi-exabyte data sets sitting on tape somewhere that almost no one ever asks for.

          • By ChromaticPanic 2026-01-2920:30

            Well it makes sense the public API has restrictions. They probably have separate enterprise licensing.

      • By Propelloni 2026-01-2916:36

        Isn't EUMETSAT data usually under CC-by-SA 3.0? So all you have to do is to register with them and get your client ID for API access, or are there more hoops to jump through?

      • By davidw 2026-01-2920:32

        > restrictive about access to this kind of data

        After all, we don't know if the weather consented to having its data displayed, or if it even allowed cookies.

    • By Aloisius 2026-01-2918:10

      Core data is CC-BY-4.0, "recommended" data is licensed with a fee for certain commercial uses.

      https://user.eumetsat.int/resources/user-guides/data-registr...

    • By pastage 2026-01-299:372 reply

      As most EU projects yes. There was test data released last year to get you started.

      https://user.eumetsat.int/resources/user-guides/getting-star...

      • By SirHumphrey 2026-01-2910:043 reply

        Well, at least in my experience with EU projects, they tend to be much more restrictive with data sharing than equivalent US institutions: e.g. a lot of paid EUMET data has publicly available NOAA equivalents - though usually of worse quality.

        • By pastage 2026-01-2911:032 reply

          Yes! That government agencies data is PD is a nice feature of US law, we should implement that in EU.

          • By wolvoleo 2026-01-2913:141 reply

            Try to ask the NRO for their images and see how you go :)

            • By dylan604 2026-01-2917:08

              Intelligence gathering data vs weather data. Yeah, that's the same thing.

          • By stiray 2026-01-2914:271 reply

            Not Public Domain, TD - Taxpayers Domain. :)

        • By IshKebab 2026-01-2910:261 reply

          Not sure why you're being down-voted. US weather models are free. EU models are not.

          • By tcumulus 2026-01-2911:061 reply

            Depends on which model. Only really the ECMWF weather model is not fully free. The German, French, Dutch, ... models are all free (regional and global models). Of course, these global models are generally less accurate than ECMWF, still ECMWF has a lot of free data available too. US models are also freely available, and quite easy to work with (as opposed to some European ones).

            • By NoiseBert69 2026-01-3023:14

              You can see the most important charts from the ECMWF model for free on ecmwf.int. But you will not get the data behind them.

        • By bayindirh 2026-01-2913:54

          Take a look at https://zenodo.org/communities/eu/

          Yes, it's not everything, but it's a start.

      • By graemep 2026-01-2914:24

        It is not an EU project. It is an ESA and EUMETSAT project. Neither is an EU organisation. Both have multiple non-EU members, and I do not think all EU countries are members of either.

    • By pbhjpbhj 2026-01-2912:55

      There was a good CCC talk on pulling images from weather sats (and data from other satellites) - https://youtu.be/fM5w7bFNvWI?si=Dq6S6nYOE_frAd7b

      It's been done before, but this was a great talk imo.

    • By jcattle 2026-01-299:38

      Yes, it will be freely available to the public

    • By complex_pi 2026-01-2921:47

      EUMETSAT publishes data as CC-BY 4.0 past a timeliness of 1 hour https://www.eumetsat.int/data-policy/eumetsat-data-policy.pd...

      Look for your dataset here https://data.eumetsat.int/ (Note: you need registration but it is free).

    • By bitschubser_ 2026-01-299:331 reply

      I guess you will be able to access the data with copernicus (usually thy even provide raw L0 data)

    • By plantain 2026-01-2910:163 reply

      Definitely not in anything like realtime, maybe an archive. There's a licence fee of 8000EUR/yr to access real-time EUMETSAT data. Welcome to Europe, where you pay for everything twice.

      • By vidarh 2026-01-2913:20

        There's an 8k license for "recommended" (not "core", which is free under CC-BY-4.0 for all purposes) data if you are a service provider or broadcaster:

        https://user.eumetsat.int/resources/user-guides/data-registr...

        There are also fees in some other circumstances, but not for "personal, educational, research" use.

      • By pantalaimon 2026-01-2915:23

        lame, with GOES-18 you can just download the latest full disk image in real time. Makes for a nifty desktop background when combined with a systemd user timer that fetches the current picture of the earth every 15 minutes.

        https://www.goes-r.gov/multimedia/dataAndImageryImagesGoes-1...

      • By anfogoat 2026-01-2911:31

        Hah! I don't believe this for a second. No, you need the 8k, a business entity (at the very least), five different licenses of some sort, and then some form of accreditation.

  • By hubraumhugo 2026-01-298:3311 reply

    I recently met a European space startup founder and was surprised to learn how much space innovation is happening in Europe with ESA. Europe wants to become less depended on SpaceX and NASA, and is heavily investing there. More funding + strong aerospace programs at universities like TU Munich has led to companies like ISAR Aerospace (SpaceX competitor), which is great to see.

    • By TrackerFF 2026-01-298:43

      I work in the domain, and it is true that many of the startups will almost entirely use free data, like from the sentinel satellites via ESA. It really lowers the barriers to entry, if you have a nice idea.

      EDIT:

      We actually work close with one startup that sprung out from academia. The founders wrote their masters thesis on object detection and pattern recognition using sentinel imaging. They had basically one product: to detect certain objects. After a couple of years they had gotten a handful of customers (basically they'd receive coordinates to some are of interest, and then tasked with trying to detect something), which afforded them to purchase commercial data (from other types of sensors) for building more robust systems. This in turn grew their customer bas, and they started adding products.

      Then they were acquired by one of the largest private space companies.

      But, in any case, it all started with access to free data. Would they have started a company like this, if they hadn't had access to the data from ESA? Who knows, but it made it all much easier. And they were able to completely bootstrap the company.

    • By saubeidl 2026-01-298:42

      Europe is behind in launchers, but the stuff they send up is top-notch.

      Euclid, the latest ESA telescope is particularly mind-blowing, capturing a third of the visible sky in incredible detail.

      Check out this update video, it's insane how they can zoom in on stuff: https://youtube.com/watch?v=rXCBFlIpvfQ

    • By joeig 2026-01-298:491 reply

      If you are ever in Munich and want to find out more, be sure to visit the ESO Supernova[0].

      [0] https://supernova.eso.org/

      • By jahller 2026-01-299:57

        definitely worth a visit. loved the exhibition about the Atacama desert telescopes. especially great for kids.

    • By KellyCriterion 2026-01-298:341 reply

      There are even Hackathons from ESA:

      "Act in Space"

      https://actinspace.org/

      I worked at one of the hosts of one these events years ago - very intersting people there!

      • By 3D30497420 2026-01-298:431 reply

        Very cool!

        Small odd thing, but that's the first tracking warning modal I've seen that says they don't actually use tracking. And I can decline the no tracking? Kinda funny.

        • By KellyCriterion 2026-01-2917:51

          "Advanced EU-regulatory conform implementation of latest requirements" ;-) ;-)

    • By panick21_ 2026-01-2911:04

      Can you show some actual evidence of that? Because evidence actually shows that commercial growth in the US outpaces Europe by a gigantic degree. The traditional European companies like Airbus has made lots of loses. European companies are not even competing in the LEO race to any serious degree.

      Their 'compete with SpaceX' Ariane 6 rocket has been an unmitigated disaster. And in order to 'compete with SpaceX' they are giving billions in subsidies to Amazon instead, I guess that is better. And its exactly what they didn't want to do when they designed the Ariane 6 program in the first place.

      > companies like ISAR Aerospace (SpaceX competitor)

      If anything they are a far, far, far inferior competitor of RocketLab. SpaceX isn't even in the same universe as ISAR.

      The simple fact is, small rocket companies are not viable, and pretty much all of them are not profitable and/or go bust. RocketLab itself basically never made money from rockets, the pivoted mostly to in-space stuff.

      Maybe one of the small European rocket companies can survive if it gets enough support from ESA, but then moving on to anything beyond that is going to be hard.

      > NASA, and is heavily investing there

      If we look at ESA and EU space budget, we can see that it goes up a bit, but nowhere near close to anything in the US.

      So yes, there is some energy in the European space sector, but its very easy to overestimate, and specially if you look at it compared to the US.

    • By simgt 2026-01-298:452 reply

      maiaspace (https://www.maia-space.com/) also intends to compete with SpaceX and is an Ariane spin-off, they're meant to do their first launch this year and start putting satellites in LEO in 27

      • By dagi3d 2026-01-299:02

        There is also a Spanish company which according to them, they were the first private European company to reach space with their rocket: https://www.pldspace.com/en/

      • By panick21_ 2026-01-2911:10

        There were once about 300 small rocket companies. About 250 of them are dead by by now.

        The Europeans were late to the game, and their companies got some late investment.

        Out of those 300 companies basically 0 of them have actually made money with rockets. Companies like RocketLab pivoted to in-space stuff and that's where they actually make money.

        Pretty much every single small rocket company has lost money with small rockets and pivots to larger rockets where there is more demand because of constellations. But in Europe, that will be near impossible because of the Ariane monopoly.

        And closing the case on reuse for small rockets is even more difficult.

        I really think calling companies that have barley done a test-launch 'spacex competitors' is a silly. At best its a luxury competitor to SpaceX ride-share launches.

    • By usrusr 2026-01-2911:06

      At this point, calling ISAR a competitor to SpaceX feels a bit like calling Pringles a competitor to TSMC, but it's certainly good to see some movement happening.

    • By riffraff 2026-01-2910:131 reply

      there's a pretty great blog following european space news

      https://europeanspaceflight.com/

      A lot has been happening in recent years with launchers once ESA broke the Ariane "chokehold".

      • By panick21_ 2026-01-2911:13

        Except of course the Ariane chockhold never existed for small rockets. Because Vega exists. And for large rockets the "chokehold" very much continues to exist and shows absolutely zero evidence of going away in the next decade.

        So far the support for these small launchers has been mostly for new missions and nowhere near in the volume to support even two of these small launch companies. Specially if Vega also survives as a rocket.

        Europe simply does not produce enough launches for these companies. And all of them will suffer from very low launch rates and non will be able to seriously compete for international payloads.

    • By johanneskanybal 2026-01-2913:44

      For sure, it's booming in the current climate. My biggest bet for 2026 is Eutelsat which is the biggest star link competitor.

    • By _fizz_buzz_ 2026-01-299:531 reply

      The Trump administration is probably helping quite a bit on two fronts here:

      - A very strong political will to decouple strategic industries from the US

      - The US is making it a lot harder to work there. So top talent stays in Europe.

      • By wolvoleo 2026-01-2913:15

        - Top talent doesn't even want to move to the US anymore either.

        I mean really I'm super progressive and LGBTIQ+ aligned. I'm not even flying there for a meeting anymore, sorry. My employer is European and I'm part of the inclusion team, they are understanding me refusing US travel.

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