It will gather information which will be invaluable for environmental research and applications. As with ERS, certain data will be used by The Met. Office to support NWP and climatological research. Some eight years ago the United States announced that they would not support the NOAA polar satellite morning orbit after about 2002. The nature of funding for such expensive programmes is subject to change, whereby prestige and free data access are no longer sufficient motivation for countries to invest in new programmes.
Office fully utilizes the data when available.
It is planned that in the near future Meteosat will be able to relay and disseminate images from all five satellites. FY-2, the Chinese geostationary satellite was launched on 10 June 1997 and, although very early days, it is hoped that some exchange of data may be arranged when agreements are in place. It is hoped that this will change in the future with co-operation agreements being negotiated between the Indian authorities and The Met. They provide atmospheric sounding data which are assimilated into NWP models and also provide coverage over the polar regions which are ill-served by the geostationary satellites. The imagery provided by polar orbiters provides more detail because of the low orbit compared to geostationary satellites.