Mr. Saba tells of being called to a technical meeting in the imposing limestone building on London's Strand that houses the BBC satellitemonitoring center.
Like many other large companies, millennium night itself will see hundreds of extra people, armed with satellite phones, monitoring developments around the clock.
In more recent years, however, a new set of ocean monitors has documented a decrease in the rate of oceanic heating for the same time period that satellite-based monitoring systems have shown an expanding imbalance between incoming and outgoing energy flows.
He said the UK earlier this year chaired the Disaster Monitoring Committee which ensured satellite images were immediately available after the tsunami in Japan or disasters elsewhere in the world.
An application where the satellite could find a particularly useful role is in monitoring forests - or to be more precise: in monitoring deforestation.
The researchers used data from the global network of solar monitoring telescopes (Gong) as well as the Soho satellite positioned in a stable orbit 1.6 million km (a million miles) closer to the Sun than the Earth.