A EUMETSAT delegation led by the Director General of the organization, Dr. Lars Prahm, met with the Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Mr. G. Madhavan Nair.
As part of the cooperation agreement between the two organizations, EUMETSAT and ISRO conduct regular follow-up meetings to discuss joint activities. On this occasion, the focus was on a possible extension of the cooperation in the field of meteorology and operational oceanography. The ISRO presented its latest project which aims at building a national meteorological data center. As part of this activity, both delegations discussed possibilities for ISRO access to the data stream delivered by EUMETSAT’s EUMETCast data dissemination system. In this context, ISRO also indicated an interest in participating in the discussions of the Coordination Group on Meteorological Satellites (CGMS).
EUMETSAT presented the plans currently being discussed with its Member States concerning the near-real time processing of data delivered by Altika, the wideband Ka-band altimeter on board the Indian SARAL satellite. Pending a decision from its Summer Council, EUMETSAT might be involved in the SARAL mission by providing a processing and dissemination service for near-real-time data. This would ensure further provision of precise altimetry data to the EUMETSAT user community. Another point of discussion concerned possible access by EUMETSAT to the scatterometer data of the Indian OCEANSAT-2 satellite, planned to be launched in September of 2009. Data from OCEANSAT-2 would complement those currently provided by the Advanced Scatterometer instrument on the Metop satellites as well as by the U.S. Quickscat satellite. U.S., Europe, and India coordinate their efforts in this area in the framework of the Committee of Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) constellation on Ocean Surface Wind. In addition to these items, ISRO and EUMETSAT exchanged views on possible further scientific cooperation. It was agreed that a formal bilateral meeting between the two organizations should take place at the end of 2009 or early in 2010.
