Abstract. One of the first disciplines in which remote sensing has had obvious applications is in meteorology. The main applications, which have been developed for using satellite data in manual and short term forecasting and for numerical weather prediction models, are described. Some examples arc also given to illustrate these applications. Meteorological applications require the data in near real time but if the data are processed and archived a useful data set for climatologica! research is also produced. Some examples of the application of satellite data to climatology are given. Finally some promising future developments in the use of satellite data in meteorology and climatology during the next ten years are briefly outlined.