Direct Access to Satellite Data

The expiring year witnessed the installation of the Alice-SC satellite data receiving and processing station at the Voyeikov Main Geophysical Observatory in St-Petersburg (Russia). The station has been developed and installed on the basis of observatory by the ScanEx specialists and enables to work with data, received from polar-orbiting meteo-satellites via L-band (1,7 GHz).

The Main Geophysical Observatory (MGO), established in January 1849 by the Degree of the Emperor Nikolai I, is the oldest meteorological institution in the world. Now its specialists can handle meteorological satellites data of NOAA (USA), MetOp-A (European meteo-agency) and FengYun (China) in direct readout mode.

To date, MGO, being the leading scientific and methodological center of RosHydroMet, carries out scientific studies and research work in several areas:

• long-term weather forecasting, applied climatology, physics of clouds and active impacts on the atmospheric processes, air pollution;

• methodology of creating and functioning of ground meteorological monitoring networks, atmospheric condition and pollution and chemical composition of atmospheric precipitation monitoring;

• assessment of the hydrometeorological data application efficiency in economic branches.

The observatory is operating in the same manner as the World Meteorological Organisation on the issues of solar radiation, as the basic CIS organisation on meteorological support and certification of methods and tools of meteo measurements, etc.

Currently, equipment for ground-based remote sensing is being designed and developed at the MGO, as well as methods of received data processing. Therefore, Earth remote sensing data application will allow performing a set scientific and research studies on data verification and validation of atmospheric parameters recovery algorithms, based on the measurement data received from the ground and from space.