1960

Weather Satellites

When they were first introduced in the late 1940s, ground-based weather radar systems almost immediately had a profoundly strong impact on the ability to track and forecast storms and to save lives during the most extreme weather events. Still, even though they could be linked to larger networks, they mostly provided only a relatively limited local perspective on the weather. Balloons, aircraft, and sub-orbital sounding rockets could help provide a broader perspective, but they could be deployed only infrequently, and still might only provide a relatively local view of the weather. What was needed was a truly global perspective—like a view of the Earth from space.

With the dawn of the space age and the successful launch of the world’s first scientific satellites in the late 1950s, it became possible to deploy cameras and other instruments into Earth orbit to monitor the weather and other characteristics of our planet’s surface and atmosphere. As a result, in 1960 a joint team from the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and the US Army’s Signal Research and Development Laboratory (“Army Signal Corps”), under the direction of a newly created federal agency called the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), launched and operated the first successful weather satellite, called TIROS-1 (for Television InfraRed Observation Satellite). Even though its mission was short (just 78 days), it proved so successful and so useful for weather forecasters that it spawned a 20-year series of seven new weather satellites called Nimbus 1 to Nimbus 7.

These early weather satellites were in short-period low-Earth orbits. Starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, another relatively new federal agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began to operate satellites in geosynchronous orbits, effectively “parking” them above different parts of North America so that they could continuously monitor the same large region all the time. Among the most successful workhorses of the US weather-satellite world are the NOAA Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) series, the first of which was launched in October 1975, and the seventeenth of which was launched in March 2018. The Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and European space agencies have also launched and operated many geosynchronous weather satellites to provide critical forecasting data for their parts of the planet as well.

A 1960 photo of engineers testing the Television Infrared Observation Satellite (TIROS), the world’s first successful weather satellite, at RCA in Princeton, New Jersey.