ABB to supply interferometer for Himawari-10 Japanese geostationary meteorological satellite

ABB has been awarded a contract by L3Harris Technologies, a leading US defense company, to develop and build a high-resolution infrared interferometer system to power the next generation of L3Harris hyperspectral infrared (IR) sounder. The system onboard the Himawari-10 satellite built by Mitsubishi Electric in Japan, will map in 3D the earth’s atmosphere over the Asia-Pacific region for 10 years.

The L3Harris sounder will be deployed at an altitude of 36 000 km in geostationary orbit, helping the Japan Meteorological Agency to improve predictions of the trajectory and intensity of extreme weather events as well as extend its long-term forecast. It will offer 30-minute revisit capability, considerably augmenting the quality and quantity of information feeding the weather prediction models over what is currently available. 

Atmospheric sounders are high-end optical instruments able to probe the air mass’s physical properties driving weather such as temperature, humidity and movement. The bulk of the digital information ingested by supercomputers calculating today’s daily and hourly forecasts comes from infrared and microwave sounders. While Low Earth Orbit (LEO) weather satellites can map the whole globe, they can only refresh the data twice daily which creates an important temporal coverage shortage. Geostationary (GEO) weather satellites on the other hand ‘stand still’ in the sky over the equator and can track weather pattern evolution with a much-improved refresh rate.

However, Geostationary orbits are too distant for companion microwave sounders to operate making the IR sounders the sole instruments able to capture a time-lapsed digitised 3D view of the weather below.

“Hyperspectral IR sounders, introduced for the first time in 2011 on the joint NASA/NOAA polar-orbiting NPP satellite, led to a transformation in the field of weather forecasting,” said Dr Frederic Grandmont, Space Technology and Business Development Manager, ABB Measurement & Analytics. “Himawari-10 is expected to bring another level of improvement in weather forecasting accuracy for Japan and the Asia Pacific region, and the rest of the globe as long-term 14-day forecasts have global dependencies.” 

This contract follows a separate supply agreement between ABB and L3Harris, under which ABB has provided six interferometers for the Cross-track Infrared Sounder for the US low earth polar orbiting weather satellites series launched since 2011.