New Satellite Will Monitor Global Warming

A £1.4bn environmental monitoring satellite the size of an articulated lorry was today launched from a base in French Guiana.

Designed in part by researchers at the Leicester University space centre, Envisat will record information on environmental changes, including global warming, ozone layer depletion, earthquakes, volcanoes and floods.

For the next five years it will send back data enabling scientists to work out whether long-term changes to the Earth's climate are already under way and also to make predictions on what will happen in the future.

The environment secretary, Margaret Beckett, said the government contributed £11m to the funding of one of the 10 instruments on board.

"With the aid of these results governments will be better placed to make informed decisions about their environmental policies," she added.

The government-sponsored instrument will help scientists assess the long-term global trends in the surface temperature of the sea.

David Llewellyn-Jones, professor of earth observation science at Leicester University, said the satellite could have a huge impact on the way in which environmental changes were monitored.

"The satellite will measure the temperature of the Earth's surface very precisely and continuously, so we can detect global warming, determine its magnitude and see how it is distributed, including those parts of the world that are becoming cooler as a result of global warming," he said.

The project has been backed by the European Space Agency and Canada and will allow data to be continuously relayed to scientists across Europe.