[SatNews] Replacing Dr. Lars Prahm to lead the organization is the current Deputy Director-General...

Alain Ratier, 53, takes over as Director-General of EUMETSAT, the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, on August 1, 2011. He succeeds Dr. Lars Prahm, who returns to the Danish Meteorological Institute as its Director-General, a post he already occupied before he became EUMETSAT’s Director-General.

M. Ratier was appointed by the EUMETSAT Council in December 2010 and comes to the organization from Météo-France, where he has been Deputy Director-General since 2004. In this capacity, he directly supported the Météo-France Chairman and CEO in all strategic and management matters. In this position, he has been very active in the field of European cooperation.

From 1996 to 2004, M. Ratier served as the Director of Programme Development and Deputy Director-General of EUMETSAT. During this first stint at EUMETSAT, he guided the development of Meteosat Second Generation, the EUMETSAT Polar System, Jason-2 and a comprehensive ground segment including the Satellite Application Facility network. He also established the user consultation and requirement definition process for Meteosat Third Generation, supervised the setting up of the Quality Management System until its ISO:9001 certification and contributed to the definition and implementation of the first two issues of the organisation’s strategic plan. From 1994 to 1996, M. Ratier was associate director for Earth observation programs at the Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), the French space agency, after being involved, from 1987 to 1994, in the management of several major Earth observation programmes and related interactions with user communities and international partners, including Topex-Poseidon and Jason-1 (oceanography), and the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI)/Metop (meteorology and atmospheric chemistry).