European polar weather satellite ready for lift-off

Watch the skies! Next Monday will see the launch of Europe's first polar orbiter weather satellite - MetOp - due to launch from Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

The US has been providing meteorological data from polar orbit, free of charge, to users worldwide for almost 40 years. The MetOp satellite is Europe's contribution to a new co-operative venture called the Initial Joint Polar System.

The satellite will carry instruments for monitoring the atmosphere and the ocean surface, including a device to measure atmospheric temperature and humidity with a greater accuracy than has been possible from space before.

The satellite will produce large volumes of data that will go into the models that the Met Office runs on its supercomputer, said Richard Francis, head of the satellite data processing systems group at the Met Office.

After a couple of days of initial tests after launch, the satellite will go through a six month "checkout" period, during which the data will gradually become available to the scientists below.

Polar orbiting weather satellites orbit at a lower altitude than geostationary satellites - 800km compared with 35,000km for geostationary - and so can observe the Earth in closer detail.