Brazil and China are expected to announce a new joint satellite for meteorology a month from now, during the meeting of the Cosban (Sino-Brazilian High-Level Commission of Concertation and Cooperation), in Beijing. It will be the first in the field.
"It's something we've never done," says Marco Antonio Chamon, president of the Brazilian Space Agency (AEB). "We don't have meteorological satellites, we use data from American, European, Japanese satellites, which we will not abandon. This satellite will provide more data. And more data about Brazil."
According to him, the information will integrate with "existing, sophisticated models that run on the supercomputers for weather forecasting that we have in Brazil."
The Cosban meeting, on June 5 and 6, will be chaired by Vice President Geraldo Alckmin and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng.
Chamon, an electrical engineer from Unicamp, spoke during his train trip after the Sino-Latin American space cooperation forum in Wuhan, central China.
The new satellite has implications for agriculture and the environment. "The idea is to contribute in that direction," he says. "It has another advantage because meteorology has a broader, regional character, for all of South America."