Welcome to the International Satellite Winds Working Group website!

The Working Group on Satellite Derived Winds (WG-SDW) was established as a permanent Working Group at the 22nd meeting of the Coordination Group for Meteorological Satellites (CGMS) in Annapolis, MD, USA, 11-15 April 1994 under the name Cloud Motion Winds (WG-CMW). The 29th CGMS meeting in Capri, Italy, 22 - 25 October 2001 changed the name of the working group to Satellite Derived Winds. The WG-SDW was established to pursue an objective of CGMS which is to encourage support and compatibility in meteorological data products and to complement the work of other international satellite coordination mechanisms. A long time task of CGMS has been the routine exchange of validation statistics of routine inter-comparisons of Atmospheric Motion Vectors from the Geostationary satellites. CGMS has also encouraged an increase of scientific research in this field. Thus the International Satellite Winds Working Group (IWWG) places great emphasis on the coordination of operational and research efforts in the derivation of Atmospheric Motion Vectors. Although the WG emphasises the derivation of winds from the tracking of features in satellite image, other principles of deriving wind fields from satellite are addressed too.