Tempora mutantur goes the Latin saying, nos et mutamur in illis: "Times change, and we must change with them." Taking this to heart, Eumetsat, the European Meteorological Satellite Organisation, changed yesterday in a low-key but most significant way.
Eumetsat, with its headquarters in Darmstadt, Germany, is a co-operative venture by 17 European countries, each of which decided 20 years ago to pool its financial resources and take on a commitment that no one nation could contemplate on its own: they would launch weather satellites for the use of forecasters in Europe and elsewhere. The organisation, set up on June 19th, 1986, comprises all the then members of the EU with the additional support of Scandinavia, Switzerland and Turkey. It has been a most successful enterprise. Eumetsat operates the Meteosat series of geostationary weather satellites, and a new Meteosat Second Generation will take over in a year or two. Plans are also well advanced for Eumetsat polar-orbiting weather satellites. All these spacecraft are designed to provide information to forecasters around the world crucial for daily weather forecasts.
The ink was hardly dry on the Eumetsat convention when it became clear the world faced a bigger challenge than that of predicting tomorrow's weather. The global warming debate started, and it was evident that more information was needed to determine how the world's climate might be changing.
It was then decided that the Eumetsat convention would have to be amended to allow the monitoring of global climate to become one of the group's objectives.
Amending a convention is a long and tedious process. The easy bit is drafting a new text which all adherents can agree to in principle, and in the case of Eumetsat, this was accomplished in 1991.
But then this text, which forms the basis of a treaty under international law, had to be approved by the parliaments of all the countries involved, and their agreement to it formally notified to the repository, or custodian, of the convention; in this case the government of Switzerland.
Over the past nine years each of the 17 countries has ratified the convention, Ireland doing so in 1996 and Greece, the last country to do so, on October 20th. The new convention only comes into being 30 days after the last member-state has ratified it, so, after nearly a decade, Eumetsat's new convention came into force yesterday. The organisation is now formally empowered to undertake the "operational monitoring of the climate and the detection of global climate change".