Abstract The displacement of clouds in successive satellite images reflects the atmospheric circulation at various scales. The main application of the satellite-derived cloud-motion vectors is their use as winds in the data analysis for numerical weather prediction. At low latitudes in particular they constitute an indispensible data source for numerical weather prediction. This paper describes the operational method of deriving cloud-motion winds (CMW) from the IR image (10.512.5 µm) of the European geostationary Meteostat satellites. The method is automatic, that is, the cloud tracking uses cross correlation and the height assignment is based on satellite observed brightness temperature and a forecast temperature profile. Semitransparent clouds undergo a height correction based on radiative forward calculations and simultaneous radiance observations in both the IR and water vapor (5.77.1 µm) channel. Cloud-motion winds are subject to various quality checks that include manual quality control as the la...