UK

Currently (June 2015) some of the UK radiosonde stations are providing high-resolution (two-second) BUFR reports in the standard template (TM309052, GTS bulletins IUKN01 EGRR and IUSN01 EGRR), the other stations will be added shortly.  (Until recently UK radiosonde data in BUFR was sent as both reformatted TEMP reports and high-resolution reports using alternative template TM309055 without pressure; as various NWP centres could not use the reports without pressure it was decided to change template).  An article on the O-B statistics for TEMP, BUFR and BUFR with treatment of radiosonde drift has appeared in ASL (treatment of drift gives some improvement to the upper-level statistics, for consistent improvement the correct time has to be used as well as the correct horizontal location).  Operational assimilation of the high-resolution UK reports (including treatment of drift) in the UKV system started in July 2014.  Some radiosonde BUFR data is being monitored in the global NWP system.  

Reference: Ingleby B. and Edwards D.  2015: Changes to radiosonde reports and their processing for numerical weather prediction.  Atmospheric Science Letters, 16: 44-49. doi: 10.1002/asl2.518
     http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asl2.518/abstract

2 Comments

  1. Patricia Pauley

    Are the heights in the new BUFR template for the high-resolution data geopotential heights or GPS heights?  We will need to convert them to pressure for NAVGEM, the U.S. Navy operational global model and data assimilation system.

    Thanks–Patricia Pauley, NRL

    1. Bruce Ingleby

      The heights are geopotential, as far as I know they have been converted from the GPS geometric heights using a local value (profile?) of g.