Meteosat is a geostationary, earth observation satellite launched by ESA and now operated by Eumetsat. It provides weather oriented imaging of the Earth's globe at both visible and infra-red wavelengths. Its field of view is restricted to that obtained from its location 36000km above the intersection of the Equator and the Greenwich Meridian. From this vantage point, at half-hourly intervals, it sends digitaly encoded, high resolution, infra-red and visible light images to its operational base station in Germany. Here the raw images are processed, corrected, chopped into 800 by 800 pixel sections and annotated before being disseminated via transponders onboard the spacecraft. A dissemination schedule is published by Eumetsat detailing what pictures are transmitted at which times and on what channel, a Microsoft XL version is also available here, courtesy Eumetsat. Images are relayed to the user community both digitally (now encrypted) and in the analogue WEFAX format on two FM transmission frequencies: Channel A1 at 1691MHz and Channel A2 at 1694.5MHz. Our ground station receives, decodes and stores these wefax images, then makes them available to the Internet community.
Meteosat is operated by the Eumetsat organisation, first point of contact there is: ops@eumetsat.de, also there's Volker Gaertner: Gaertner@eumetsat.de, or dillen@eumetsat.de, phone and fax numbers are: (49) 6151 807369, (49) 6151 807304 respectively. The IRS help desk is at: irshelp@mail.esrin.esa.it. Any ESA-related enquiries can be addressed to Mr. Jean Le Ber: jleber@esoc.esa.de
More information about the spacecraft is available from Eumetsat's home page. Here are some pointers into ESA many web pages: ESA/ESOC Germany's welcome page, ESA Italy's Earth Observation page or their On-line Publications page. Try also NASA's GOES page for a wealth of related weather satellite information.
Lookup our Wefax-only version of the dissemination schedule here.