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For more than 30 years, drifting buoys had been sending their observations ashore thanks to the Argos system, exclusively. Argos data are processed by CLS in Toulouse (France) and in Largo (USA). For many years, data had been sent onto the GTS in FM18 BUOY and FM94 BUFR (never-validated WMO template), in parallel. Since 2008, Iridium Short Burst Data (SBD) has been more and more used for the transmission of drifting buoy data ashore. Several centres are processing the raw data in order to send them onto the GTS in FM18 BUOY. Out of them, some have been transmitted in FM94 BUFR (a never-validated WMO template, and the template 315009), in parallel.As of end 2016, the migration from TAC to BUFR is considered about complete for drifting buoysToday, data from nearly all platforms are transmitted in the expected BUFR template 315009. The transmission of the never-validated BUFR WMO template has ended.
The transition is now mostly complete, with only few centres still producing data on the GTS in FM18 BUOY.
GTS headers for drifting buoy in BUFR format data start with character string 'IOB'.
Warning to data users: Two timestamps are included in each drifing buoy observation message. Each timestamp is preceded by its related time significance (BUFR element 0 08 021). It must be noted that, in template TM315009, the first timestamp is this of the last known position (value is 26). This of the observation (time significance = 25), also called "nominal reporting time" is in second position. Do not confuse both.
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Situation as of 12 December 2018 (Météo-France)
All the drifting buoy data transmitted on the GTS are in BUFR 315009, except for messages in FM-18 BUOY still produced from:
- CWAO: these are duplicate of messages sent in BUFR – so no problem there, as long as users take care of handling duplicates (easily identifiable with the addition of "00" in the middle of the identifier, when going from 5-digits to 7-digits).
- RJTD: these are duplicate of messages sent in BUFR – but beware the TAC and BUFR identifiers differ! There are however only 3 platforms in this case, at the time of writing.
Survey as of 13 December 2016 (ECMWF)
NOTE: in this map the BUFR is converted to TAC for internal applications. The important bit is that there are now very few platforms not reporting in BUFR.
JMA starts to produce BUFR
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