Weather Forecasting Satellites—Past, Present, & Future

Climate change has made weather more erratic and unpredictable. As a result, a growing need to develop more reliable short-term weather prediction models paved the way for a new era in satellite instrumentation technology, where radar systems for meteorological applications became critically important. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the evolution of weather forecasting satellites. We trace the technological development from the early weather and climate monitoring systems of the 1960s. Since the use of stabilized TV camera platforms on satellites aimed at capturing cloud cover data and storing it on magnetic tape for later readout and transmission back to ground stations, satellite sensor instrument technologies took great strides in the following decades, incorporating advancements in image and signal processing into satellite imagery methodologies. As innovative as they were, these technologies still lacked the capabilities needed to allow for practical use cases other than scientific research. The paper further examines how the next phase of satellite platforms is aimed at addressing this technological gap by leveraging the advantages of low Earth orbit (LEO) based satellite constellation deployments for near-real-time tracking of atmospheric hydrometers and precipitation profiles through innovative methods. These methods involve combining the collected data into big-data lakes on internet cloud platforms and constructing innovative AI-based multi-layered weather prediction models specifically tailored to remote sensing. Finally, we discuss how these recent advancements form the basis for new applications in aviation, severe weather readiness, energy, agriculture, and beyond.