Links for migration to BUFR and WIGOS Station Identifiers

WMO

WMO Codes and Migration to TDCF (Table Driven Code Forms)
Further information and technical supports for migration this includes WMO Codes: Presentations for training on Table Driven Code Forms (some are out of date now)
WMO Codes: Guide to WMO Table-Driven Code Forms FM 94 BUFR and FM 95 CREX - 1 January 2002
Operational newsletter - current year gives details of some changes. For archive see Operational newsletter - 2017 etc.
WIGOS Station Identifiers, announcement of introduction
System of WIGOS Identifiers various linked pages provide additional details
Letter from WMO, 30 October 2017 giving guidance on migration to WIGOS station identifiers. The IPET-CM highlighted the risk from underestimating the impact of introduction of the WSI, which has the potential to impact all systems tasked with processing and storage of observational data with traditional station identifiers. (This is a major change for NWP centres and it will take time before they are ready to process WIGOS identifiers. Until systems have been changed GTS bulletins containing WIGOS identifiers may be discarded.)
Template examples including B/C25 - Regulations for reporting TEMP, TEMP SHIP and TEMP MOBIL data in TDCF (docx) or pdf version. The Annexes to B/C25 include the 3 9 052 template for radiosonde data and also the descriptors for additional radiosonde metadata. (Currently such additional data are mainly available for Vaisala radiosondes - see their Sounding Data Continuity page - and the U.S.A. high-resolution reports. Originally the extra metadata came after the main report but due to a change in the recommendations it comes before the main report for the U.S.A. stations.)
WMO maintains an email Google Groups forum for notification and discussion of WMO observing system data quality issues reported by those with affiliation to national and international NWP centres. To request subscription to this forum, either visit the forum at: https://groups.google.com/a/wmo.int/forum/#!forum/nwp-observations-data-quality-issues or else send a request to gos@wmo.int, providing a short justification and your organizational affiliation.
Overall responsibility for the migration rests with the WMO Commission for Basic Systems (CBS). Practical details are discussed at the Inter-Programme Expert Team on Codes Management (IPET-CM; predecessor group was IPET-DRMM "Data Representation Maintenance and Monitoring") and "CBS Management Group Task Team on representing upper air information in BUFR" (TT-UAB).

Migration wiki page

TAC to BUFR migration includes information from ECMWF and other centres, including data availability page (updated from time to time).

Reports/Papers

Status Report on Migration to Table-Driven Code Forms (MTDCF) (PR-6868), DRMM, 2015
Progress report on migration to BUFR (ECMWF, 2015)
Progress towards high-resolution, real-time radiosonde reports Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 97, 2149-2161, 2016
Cessation of alphanumeric reports: NWP Centres need advance notice WIGOS Newsletter Oct 2017

BUFR decoding packages

ECMWF ecCodes This replaces the previous ECMWF decoder BUFRDC and also provides a BUFR validator. There are both command line tools and interfaces to Fortran, Python and C (see example programs). See Fucile, E., S. Kertész, S. Lamy-Thépaut, S. Najm, 2016: ECMWF's new data decoding software ecCodes. ECMWF Newsletter No. 146, pages 35-39
NCEP BUFRLIB

Data sources

Current BUFR data are available from various WMO Global Information System Centres (GISCs), of which Tokyo GISC is the most convenient. The easiest approach is to select 'WMO Format' - 'Select and browse' and then specify 'Data type' - BUFR, 'Subcategory' - TEMP (bulletins with 'Access'=Open can be downloaded by anyone). Either leave Location empty (for global data) or specify the required country (eg Spain; Spain and many other European countries provide high resolution upper-air data). The resulting link can be simplified to: http://www.wis-jma.go.jp/data/browse?&Type=BUFR&Subcategory=TEMP&Location=Spain and if you know the indicator and want data for a particular date/time: http://www.wis-jma.go.jp/d/o/LEMM/BUFR/Upper_air/TEMP/20151209/120000/. For GTS purposes the bulletins are known by their identifier (which starts IU for BUFR Upper Air data, eg IUSA05) and their indicator or collecting centre (eg LEMM - Madrid, a list can be found at Location Indicators used in the Abbreviated Heading). As with other web sites details of the URLs may change over time.

There is currently no openly available long-term archive of radiosonde BUFR data although data has been provided to NCEI and the Copernicus Climate Data Store and access is expected in 2018. There is an archive of US High Vertical Resolution Radiosonde Data in NetCDF format. This page also links to other archives (UK and GRUAN).

Observation monitoring

ECMWF Global Data Monitoring Report Archive ECMWF is lead centre for monitoring radiosonde data, but other major NWP centres also have comprehensive monitoring systems.
EUMETNET Observations Quality Monitoring NB. The WMO Portal is openly available, but the EUCOS Portal is not. Basic statistics are available for either FM35 (alphanumeric) or BUFR, the comparisons with NWP are for whichever data stream is assimilated operationally (at ECMWF).
Monitoring of the observing system. The 'conventional data monitoring' section gives a more day-to-day view of ECMWF monitoring, including current data coverage and global time-series.

February 2018