Thinking Point - Phil Evans | European Space Forum 2024

Thank you very much. Why do we think? Sometimes we think because this is a thinking point. Why do we think? Sometimes we think because we see something for the first time, sometimes because we see something in a different way, and sometimes because we've forgotten to see something. Now I'm from EUMETSAT and I'm going to talk about the weather. To some extent we all know what the weather does — severe weather events, spoiled picnics — but actually we don't really understand how massively significant weather is. It impacts almost every aspect of our life, from the trivial to the serious. It impacts what we all know about severe weather events, but also the spread of diseases, footfall in shops, military activities, and global security issues. It affects absolutely everything. It's so important to try and put that in context. The World Economic Forum every year does an assessment of its members and asks what they think are the biggest risks their countries face over two and ten years. This year, and it's the same virtually every year, over two years two of the risks are weather and climate related, and over ten years five of the risks are weather and climate related. The European Environment Agency has estimated that between 1980 and 2020, severe weather events cost the European economy over 500 billion euros and caused a loss of up to 14,000 lives. In the US last year, there were 19 weather events with an impact of more than $1 billion each, with a total cost to the US economy of $70 billion. That's largely looking back. Then you consider climate change and what's happening. We're all aware of this, but again, if you look at the European Environment Agency report, between the end of last year and the beginning of this year, average global temperatures were 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial averages. The previous 12 months from May 24 of this year, each of those months was record-breaking. Weather and climate events last year cost Europe over 13 billion euros, 1.6 million people were affected by floods, 36,000 by wildfires, and half a million by storms. That illustrates an interesting point: climate impacts in so many different ways in different places. But the underlying point is that it stresses our infrastructure, our society, everything about our countries and societies. As climate change proceeds and the atmosphere becomes more energetic, the severe weather events we see so often will become more intense and more frequent. That is why, if you look at the impact of weather and climate services in Europe, they contribute between 50 and 60 billion euros every year to the European economy. Now you may be thinking, "That's quite interesting, but what's that got to do with a space conference?" Well, if you look at numerical weather prediction — the large computer models that predict the weather — currently about 70% of their accuracy is derived from space-based observations, and that is increasing dramatically. So space and space observations play an absolutely massive role in something that is incredibly important and becoming increasingly important to our society. That is why the role of EUMETSAT and other organizations like us are so important. We work with our user community, the people who use our data — weather services and weather companies — to provide them with data. We understand their needs, and understanding their needs, we work particularly with the European Space Agency to specify and develop programs of missions that provide the right information to help people make decisions that mitigate the impacts of severe weather and climate change. That's why what we do is so important and so exciting. Now we are in the process of upgrading to our next generation of satellites. Our core satellites are both geostationary and LEO. We launched the first of our geostationary missions in December 2022, which hosted a lightning imager and a high-resolution imager. The lightning imager is unique over Europe. Soon we will be launching another imager on an infrared sounder, which takes a profile through the depth of the atmosphere. These instruments are crucially important in predicting very short range, very intense events — the sorts of events that cause flash flooding and impact so many people. These very intense events are very hard to predict using forecast models; the only way to pinpoint their location and intensity is through satellites. The next generation of our LEO satellites, Metop Second Generation, will be launched hopefully next year. This will have a revolutionary impact on the quality of longer-term forecasts. There will be two satellites carrying a wide range of instruments, impacting longer-term forecasts and allowing longer-term planning. Both the LEO and geostationary satellites will secure the provision of data to Europe until the 2040s, hopefully. But we are already looking to the future, thinking about new opportunities and new missions. We are already piloting the purchasing of data from private sector providers and putting that into an operational environment. The operational environment is important — if you are providing services that protect life and property, the data always has to be there and it has to be reliable. So the operational element is really important. In addition, we are looking at new programs. One is a follow-on from the ESA Arctic weather satellite program that will be launched soon. We are looking to implement a constellation of small satellites, which is quite different for us, that will provide really massive increases in forecast accuracy. The increases are so big that when we assessed the return on investment for the Arctic program, we came out with over 50 to 1. I have seen public sector bodies make major investments with far worse ratios. This is how we are looking to the future and new developments in the space segment. In addition, in the next few years we will be enhancing our role in operating a number of Copernicus satellites, continuing to operate Sentinel-3 and Sentinel-6, launching and operating Sentinel-4 and Sentinel-5, as well as operating the Carbon Dioxide Monitoring satellite (CO2M), and also having roles in Simmer and Crystal. As part of this same agreement with the European Commission, we also operate the WEkEO system, a data platform allowing easy access to a wide range of Copernicus data to support users in their applications. This illustrates an important point: increasingly we have to view satellite systems as part of an integrated digital infrastructure. Over recent years, making data available through a mechanism and system appropriate for its use has become incredibly important. We have developed our own big data services, and we have worked with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts to develop the European Weather Cloud, a cloud-based system allowing institutional users to access our satellite data, but importantly to have a sandbox environment where they can work together on applications and new services. Because we have developed strength in data management, we have also become a partner in another European Commission project, Destination Earth, which was formally launched in Kajaani a couple of weeks ago. That is a partnership with ESA and ECMWF; we are responsible for the Data Lake, the underpinning repository of data from satellite observations, Copernicus data, and model output that allows the synthesis and exploitation of all these data. It will be incredibly important in ensuring that all the data available to our societies has maximum impact. At this point, I have to mention AI. I think there is a rule at the moment that you cannot give a presentation without referencing AI and machine learning. AI and machine learning is absolutely having an astonishing impact in weather and wider environmental prediction. AI systems are outperforming traditional numerical weather systems that have taken decades of research to develop. In a few years, AI is outperforming them. AI techniques allow much better utilization of Earth observing data, allowing satellite data to synthesize all sorts of other products in a way we have not had before. It is an incredibly exciting time. If you bring all of that together, I think the situation we and others find ourselves in now is one of tremendous opportunity and tremendous challenge. The further exploitation of cloud, the penetration of AI and machine learning, developments in new space opportunities through the commercial sector, they are challenging for organizations like us, but they are an enormous opportunity. On the other side, expectations from society about weather and climate services continue to rise, and the developing climate crisis is only going to create more pressure on organizations like us and other service providers to provide better and better services. Dealing with all of these things is a huge challenge. The success we have had as an organization so far has been through collaboration and partnership, notably with ESA, with industry, with our users and the user community. Frankly, I think this is something that European organizations across the board do well, do better than anyone else. I think the future for us as a community and EUMETSAT as an organization is a tightly integrated, well-aligned ecosystem with a very strong focus on users and applications. So that is enough thinking points for today. Thank you.