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A technical change was implemented at ECMWF in the operational production on Tuesday 11 November 2014, in order to process and allow active assimilation of

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the following BUFR observations: SYNOP, SHIP, TEMP, TEMP SHIP, PILOT LAND, PILOT SHIP and AMDAR.

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Most of the data are still under monitoring and will be actively assimilated only if the equivalent TAC data are missing or if they are deemed to improve the forecast scores.
At the moment ECMWF is actively assimilating the following data received in BUFR

  • surface observations from United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland and Nederlands, due to the announcement of switch off of TAC.
  • upper air observations from Germany, because they are high resolution profiles.
  • E-ASAP observations which are being terminated in TAC format
  • E-AMDAR data for which a switch off of the TAC format has been announced.

For high-resolution radiosonde data in BUFR, about twice as many data points in the vertical are now used. Unfortunately not many high-resolution radiosonde data are available on GTS at the moment. Most of the upper air observations are exchanged on GTS as reformatted TEMP in separate parts A, B, C, D. This practise is not included in the B/C25 Regulations and those observations should be replaced by native BUFR high resolution data as soon as possible to allow the improvement of the observing system which is expected with the introduction of the BUFR format.

The BUFR E-AMDAR reports were switched on immediately along with small (European) proportions of the BUFR SYNOP and TEMP (including ASAP) reports.  Since then we have been gradually increasing the proportion of BUFR data used.  On 6 June 2016 ECMWF started processing BUFR BUOY data operationally.

The migration from TAC to BUFR is progressing and we are in a phase when new BUFR data are released progressively, transmission of TAC data is discontinued and many of the changes are not adequately or timely advertised. We the aim to provide a daily picture from a NWP point of view we have reviewed the maps made available since few years including a representation of the most common problems preventing the assimilation of some of the BUFR data:  Monitoring Maps

Progress report on migration to BUFR, ECMWF, March 2015

Progress towards high-resolution, real-time radiosonde reports (BAMS, 2016) 

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