Greater than any interest in the Spice Girls, or the latest goings on in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, has been the tension surrounding the Prince of Wales's swordly tap on the shoulder of the knight presumptive Arthur C. Clarke. The chivalric ambitions of the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey have been temporarily thwarted by accounts of alleged misbehaviour.
As Mark Antony remarked: "If it were so, it was a grievous fault," but in any event, Sir Arthur C. will be better remembered by meteorologists as the first to suggest the concept of the geostationary satellite. Clarke was inspired more by the possibilities for radio communication than by meteorology when he explained his theories in the October 1945 edition of Wireless World.
Warming to the subject of space stations, he wrote: "There is at least one other purpose for which the station is ideally suited, and indeed has no practical alternative. This is the problem of worldwide ultra-high-frequency radio services, including television."
After outlining the major technical and financial implications of trying to provide worldwide UHF communications on a terrestrial basis, Clarke went on: "All these problems can be solved by the use of a chain of space stations with an orbital period of 24 hours.
"The stations would lie in the Earth's equatorial plane, and would thus always remain fixed in the same spots in the sky from the point of view of terrestrial observers. Unlike other heavenly bodies they would never rise nor set. This would greatly simplify the use of directive receivers installed on the Earth."
Clarke's ideas were to materialise, not in the shape of space stations, but in the form of the satellites that have transformed TV and voice communications in the intervening decades.
In later life he himself was to describe that seminal article as deserving of the sub-title "How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time". "It is with mixed feelings," he declared, "that I can claim to have originated one of the most commercially-viable ideas of the 20th century, and to have sold it for £15", the fee he received for his work from Wireless World.
When geostationary satellites became reality in the mid1960s - around the same time that 2001: A Space Odyssey hit the screens - meteorologists were among the first to realise their benefits for their activities.
A geostationary satellite, being as it were fixed in space, looks down constantly at the same segment of the globe all the time, and successive pictures taken by it at, say, half-hourly intervals can be combined to form a "movie" of an evolving weather situation.