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These values were decoded into 16 bit signed integers.  The missing value was converted to minimum possible value (-32768e1 Pa).  Unfortunately that was treated as valid value since geopotential was not missing.  Then that caused floating point exception in computation of power of (now negative!) pressure.  In the TAC (traditional alphanumeric) reports it was safely assumed geopotential is always missing when pressure is missing.  We are not monitoring later reports regarding this issue, as the NWP system was fixed immediately.  We also contacted the originating country, and they say it will be fixed.

Upper-air

• BUFR TEMP in U.S. was once used before in assimilation from April 25 2013
• But it was stopped February 2014 .(migration back to TAC)

Trouble cases

Starting February 2014, most of U.S. TEMP BUFR reports contained unnatural geopotential height.  This issue is explained detail in Errors in BUFR radiosonde data page by FNMOC.