"I wish you wouldn't keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly," said Alice to the Cheshire Cat. "But then it vanished again quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone." Your humble scribe has just performed a very similar trick. By the time you read these words I expect to be seated at a new desk in Darmstadt, Germany. Yes! I have left, sold up, departed, gone away, a sorrowful emigre fated - and indeed feted, if I might modestly remark - to begin a new career at EUMETSAT, but Weather Eye, like that celebrated feline grin, remains behind.
Perhaps this explains why I have been rambling on a little more than usual of late about satellites? EUMETSAT, as attentive readers of this column will already know, is a co-operative venture by 17 European nations established to operate weather satellites, whose data are used by forecasters in Europe and elsewhere. It currently operates the Meteosat series of "geostationary" spacecraft that circle the Earth 22,000 miles or so above the equator, with their speed in orbit matched exactly to that of the rotating Earth below. To an observer on the ground, Meteosat appears to be fixed in space, an arrangement which allows it to collect a continual series of images of the same area of the globe all the time.
EUMETSAT has ambitious plans for the future. The next series of satellites - Meteosat Second Generation - is already planned for launch around the turn of the century, and its instruments will be more versatile than those aboard the current spacecraft. And there are also plans for a European series of polar-orbiting weather satellites - the EPS, or EUMETSAT Polar System, which will provide undistorted pictures in the northern latitudes where, because of the oblique angle from which they view the scene, the usefulness of the geostationaries is much diminished.
The end of Weather Eye, however, is not as nigh as one might fear. Mutatis mutandis, I offer my readers the same assurances as those pronounced by Archbishop John Charles McQuaid at Dublin Airport on his return from Vatican II - to the effect that the Irish people need have no concerns about the recent happenings in Rome, and could continue in their simple faith as they had always done. Weather Eye, it is planned, will continue in The Irish Times as usual; the only difference will be that the wire over which it travels to D'Olier Street every day will be a little longer. "'Curiouser and curiouser!' said Alice."