What the geostationary view changes
Meteosat stays fixed above the same point of the Earth and therefore sees Europe continuously. What that changes in the situation picture is not resolution, that is coarser than any orbiting satellite but the time axis: with an image every ten minutes the MOVEMENT of a smoke plume can be read, not merely its presence. Direction and speed follow from comparing successive images.
For the question of which settlement will be under smoke in two hours, this is the only available sensor.
Fire temperature: the only night image
The fire temperature view combines three infrared channels at 3.8, 2.2 and 1.6 micrometres: cool fires appear red, hot ones yellow to white. Because it works in the mid-infrared it is the only image product on the map that makes a statement at night as well, precisely during the hours when VIIRS and Sentinel-3 have their gap.
Beside it sits the fire radiative power product at one kilometre resolution: coarser than VIIRS, but without the wait for the next overpass. It does not replace point-accurate detection, but it bridges it.
Lightning and the cross-check
The Lightning Imager records accumulated lightning area at five-minute cadence. Dry thunderstorms are the most common natural ignition source in the working area, so the layer shows where a fire may start in the coming hours.
It only becomes a statement with the cross-check: samoEKO places a precipitation radar next to it. Lightning without rain is a dry thunderstorm; lightning with rain is an ordinary one. Only that combination turns an observation into an ignition warning. The radar's second purpose is a correction to the fire weather index: rain lowers the real danger immediately, while the computed index lags it for days.
Limits
From geostationary orbit the satellite views South-East Europe at an oblique angle. Five hundred metres in the image and one kilometre for the fire product are coarser than any measurement from low orbit; Meteosat does not resolve individual small fire fronts.
Tiles become available only ten to thirty minutes after their time slot. samoEKO therefore allows a full slot of safety margin per layer and labels each layer with the time contained in the tile, not the time of retrieval.
For retrospective work the reach is short: the fire radiative power product only goes back to 23 July 2026, the other Meteosat layers to 2024 and 2025 respectively. Irrelevant for live operation, a hard limit for any retrospective analysis.