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U.S. and European weather services will receive
environmental data in half the time, thanks to an international partnership
between three American agencies and the European Organization for the
Exploration of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT). By strengthening
EUMETSAT's data acquisition and download capabilities, the U.S. National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA), and National Science Foundation (NSF) will also strengthen the hand of satellite data in building global atmospheric models.
EUMETSAT, NOAA, NASA, and the NSF plan to leverage their assets
in and above Antarctica. EUMETSAT's series of polar-orbiting Metop satellites
will download environmental data every half-orbit, first to the organization's Svalbard
ground station and then to McMurdo Station, where the NSF shares space with NASA's
MG-1 facility. That recently-refurbished ground station will acquire the Metop
satellite and downlink, while the new NOAA-NSF McMurdo Multimission
Communications System (MMCS) transfers data to EUMETSAT Control in Germany.
Will this new "polar partnership" really provide better weather
forecasting based on improved data acquisition?
Source: SatNews
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