Tools: Europe's Next-generation Weather Satellite Sends Back First Images

The first images from the Meteosat Third Generation-Sounder satellite have been shared at the European Space Conference in Brussels, showing how the mission will provide data on temperature and humidity, for more accurate weather forecasting over Europe and northern Africa.

The images from Meteosat Third Generation-Sounder (MTG-S) show a full-disc image of Earth as seen from geostationary orbit, about 36 000 km above Earth’s surface. These images were captured on 15 November 2025 by the satellite’s Infrared Sounder instrument.

In the ‘temperature’ image (below), the Infrared Sounder used a long-wave infrared channel, which measured Earth’s surface temperature as well as the temperature at the top of clouds. Dark red corresponds to high temperatures, mainly on the warmer land surfaces, while blue corresponds to lower temperatures, typically on the top of clouds.

As would be expected, most of the warmest (dark red) areas in this image are on the continents of Africa and South America. In the top-centre of the image, the outline of the coast of western Africa is clearly visible in dark red, with the Cape Verde peninsula, home to Senegal’s capital Dakar, visible as among the warmest areas in this image. In the bottom-right of the image, the western coast of Namibia and South Africa are also visible in red beneath a swirl of cold cloud shown in blue, while the northeast coast of Brazil is visible in dark red on the left of the image.

The ‘humidity’ image (below) was captured using the Infrared Sounder’s medium-wave infrared channel, which measures humidity in Earth’s atmosphere. Blue colours correspond to regions in the atmosphere with higher humidity, while red colours correspond to lower humidity in the atmosphere.

The outlines of landmasses are not visible in this image. The areas of least atmospheric humidity, shown in dark red, are seen approximately over the Sahara Desert and the Middle East (top of image), while a large area of ‘dry’ atmosphere also covers part of the South Atlantic Ocean (centre of image). Numerous patches of high humidity are seen in dark blue over the eastern part of the African continent as well as in high and low latitudes.

Below we see a close-up from MTG-Sounder of the European continent and part of northern Africa. Like the first image above, here we see heat from land surfaces and temperatures at the top of clouds. The heat from the African continent is seen in red in the lower part of the image, while a dark blue weather

Source: HackerNews