Abstract:Chinese meteorological satellites are reviewed at their development history, service, and applications. They are developed along with the wave of meteorological satellite development worldwide. Meteorological satellites provide global sounding data as well as cloud images. Information gained from meteorological satellites helps at promoting the accuracy of the numerical weather prediction. Viewing great application potential, China has devoted to develop our own meteorological satellites. Chinese meteorological satellite system consists of 5 major components: satellite, vehicle, launching site, telemetry, and ground segment. The ground segment is a significant component for the effectiveness of the whole satellite system. After launch, it is responsible at the management of the satellites and their observation instruments. The function of ground segment covers data receiving, processing, distributing, application, and service. With 40 year effort, two series meteorological satellites (polar and geostationary) have been developed and are both in operation. Meteorological satellites provide significant information for weather forecasting, short range climate prediction and environmental monitoring. With meteorological satellites, significant severe weather systems, such as typhoon, severe rainfall, hailstone, snow storm, sand storm, even tornados are better forecasted; climate monitoring parameters, such as sea surface temperature, snow and ice cover, and vegetation indexes are supplied; environmental hazard monitoring, such as flooding, forest and grass land fire, and sand storms, is routinely provided. It is indicated that raising accuracy of the products from meteorological satellites for quantitative application is the major challenge at present. This job refers to broad areas from satellite space and ground segments to numerical weather prediction models. In one hand, meteorological satellites provide initial data for numerical weather prediction models; on the other hand, numerical weather forecast models provide background meteorological parameter fields for products derivation of meteorological satellites. Meteorological satellite and numerical weather prediction should join in a common effort at improving the both.