The Satellite Story (18 of 27)

The Satellite Story

The problem was, you could only get that image when the satellite was passing overhead, which turned out to be about twice a day at maximum.
So they weren't available all the time.
And then you had to disseminate, and quite honestly, in the early '60s and '70s, or the early '70s, we didn't really have the ability to disseminate it to the people that mattered.
The people that really needed these pictures were the forecasters, so they could analyse the atmosphere and make predictions.
In the days before the internet, images had to be sent via fax, which further reduced the quality of the pictures.

When the meteorologists, even at the universities, looked at pictures like we have here from TIROS, we can see swirls of cloud.
You can see the overall view, that there's a depression there.
But what you can't see is the detail.
You can't see the detailed cloud structures - where there's frontal systems, for example, where there's heavy convection as opposed to light convection.
So, exciting because it's the first time the meteorologists have seen a view from space, but in terms of the detail required to get very detailed weather forecasting, it's not quite there.
As technology improved, it was clear that satellites had the potential to revolutionise weather forecasting.
But first, meteorologists had to develop the skills to understand the pictures.
Now this was a whole new ball game.
They had these images.
They had to develop conceptual models so these images meant something to them in terms of what the atmosphere was doing, meant something about the dynamics of the atmosphere.
They had developed that using conceptual models, looking at frontal chart pictures.
Now they had to do the same thing using satellites.
Developing these conceptual models took time.