MTG-I2 Satellite Launch Enables Unprecedented Real-Time Weather Forecasting

On August 28, the MTG-I2 (Meteosat Third Generation Imager-2) satellite launched from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou aboard an Ariane 6 rocket. This ninth mission of the launcher marked its first flight to a geostationary transfer orbit. With this launch, ESA and Eumetsat are completing the first operational trio in the Meteosat Third Generation constellation, positioned 36,000 kilometres above the equator to maintain a permanent watch on the weather over Europe, the Mediterranean, and North Africa.

To understand the true impact of this satellite, we spoke with a veteran of satellite imagery interpretation: Panos Giannopoulos, a meteorologist at the Hellenic National Meteorological Service (HNMS) and a weather presenter at SKAI Media Group.

“When I started working 25 years ago, we only had one image every 30 minutes across three channels—the first generation of Meteosat launched two decades prior,” he recalls. The second generation brought a significant advancement with 12 channels and images every ten minutes, or every five over Europe. This allowed experts to combine channels to detect fog, dust, and volcanic ash, and to track storm evolution from formation to dissipation.

The third generation, however, represents an even greater leap. The new satellite will scan the upper quadrant of the Earth, centered on Europe, every two and a half minutes. According to Giannopoulos, “this has never been achieved anywhere in the world, not even in the United States.” He acknowledges this could outpace human analytical capacity: “I do not know whether meteorologists can fully utilize all this information on their own, but with the help of artificial intelligence, these images every 2.5 minutes could greatly improve very short-term forecasting.”

This new satellite generation also features a lightning detector, a first for Meteosat, capable of taking 1,000 samples per second within a very narrow spectral band. It does not arrive alone, however; MTG-S, the second satellite in the family, is already operating in orbit after its 2025 launch, measuring humidity and temperature profiles in the atmosphere. “Up to now, we have relied mainly on weather balloons released every 12 hours from a limited number of locations. That satellite has been providing data for less than a year, and these readings are already being fed into global forecasting models,” the meteorologist notes.

MTG-I2 will still require around six months to complete commissioning before being integrated and calibrated alongside its two sister satellites. From then on, likely around April 2027, the three will operate as a unified system. For Giannopoulos, the outcome is clear: “This third generation of Meteosat will have an impact on both very short-term forecasting, predicting the next two or three hours, and on the conventional one-to-ten-day range.”

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