Snapshots from GEO's
3rd Symposium

Held in the National Space Centre, Leicester
April 29, 2006

What a Great Day!

The Speakers

The first speaker was Douglas Mansfield, a senior forecaster with the UK Met office. Douglas gave us some background and detail about how the UK MET Office uses satellite images in conjunction with its numerical models, showing how they overlay the satellite image with their forecast model.

Sally Wannop, the User Support Manager for EUMETSAT gave details of what to expect from EUMETCAST in the way of upcoming launches and how these were going to provide more products that we and the wider user community can take advantage of. There are now 850 registered amateur users of their services. The audience expressed a vote of thanks to Sally for giving up her weekend, and also the other members of the Helpdesk for the efficient, helpful and detailed assistance that they give us all.

The afternoon session was opened by David Taylor who explained about the new data type coming from EUMETCast. David announced the launch of MSG Data Manager 2.5, which can not only deal with MSG-1 data but alternatively with the new MSG-2 data, and GeoSatSignal 6. There were demonstrations of AVHRR Manager, which will be required to capture data from the new MetOp satellite. The quality and definition from this data type, shown with HRPT Reader, is amazing. David concluded by giving some tips on getting the best from his software.

Two of our friends from Werkgroep Kunstmanen continued the presentations. Arne van Belle spoke with his usual enthusiasm and good humour about setting up a twin-PC system for EUMETCast to cope with the added load when MetOp comes on stream. Arne strongly recommended setting up a RAMdisk on the receiving PC.

Ferdinand Valk entertained everyone with an illustrated presentation relating to hurricanes.

Finally, matters were brought to a conclusion by Lawrence Harris who explained how frustration at finding the sky obscured when intent on pursuing his hobby of astronomy, he turned to weather satellites to enable him to predict when he could expect good viewing conditions. He also displayed photos taken by Patrick Moore, depicting him with colleagues after they had built their first school observatory.

The symposium was drawn to a close by Francis Bell, who presided over GEO’s AGM. He reported on the health of the company's finances and membership numbers as well as informing the delegates of the two vacancies that were soon to arise on the management team. Reports were also given by the David Painter (Education), John Tellick and Peter Green (International Liaison).

The day closed with the drawing of the raffle. There were some excellent prizes on offer, which raised £277 for GEO.

Photographs

Many thanks to Cecilia and David Taylor, Peter Bradley and Arne van Belle
for allowing us to use many of their photographs to illustrate this page