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Below are plots of SYNOP/BUOY/radiosonde BUFR coverage for February June 2016 - reports as decoded at ECMWF, some reports not in standard BUFR are not decoded.
Please can data producers ensure that there is a reasonable overlap of TAC and BUFR data on the GTS (at least two months, EUMETNET recommendation is six months), any attempt to rush the change will result in more errors, extra work for NWP centres and possibly worse forecasts. Most countries give notice via METNOs or the WMO newsletter. Note also that reformatted TEMP reports still as separate parts are not regulation BUFR and cause problems for NWP centres (some more than others).
Surface (SYNOP) coverage
Over About 80% of stations now report in BUFR, however the BUFR coverage is marginally worse than in February 2016 due to fewer reports from Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. (Iceland is reporting BUFR from almost 100 stations, compared to about 20 in TAC.) For some countries stations/reports designated for national use only are received in TAC but not in BUFR. Light blue markers indicate that fewer BUFR reports are received than SYNOP reports - in most cases the BUFR is six-hourly but the SYNOPs are three-hourly.
Countries that have ceased TAC SYNOP transmission on the GTS are shown green (most recently Germany in January 2016if this is not up-to-date please let me know) and labelled 'Post SYNOP' (see SYNOP ). ECMWF is assimilating BUFR surface reports from these countries plus some others.
(Grey: TAC reports but no BUFR, Purple: BUFR reports but no TAC, Red *: position error. Light/dark blue indicates that there are less/more than 60% of the reports available in BUFR.)
BUOY coverage
On 6 June 2016 ECMWF started passively monitoring BUFR BUOY data in its operational system, assimilation will probably start in July or August. For drifting buoys the BUFR feed is almost complete now helped by the fact that fewer data producers are involved (there are 23 Indian and Japanese drifting buoys not using the approved template as yet). There are 51 pressure-reporting buoys reporting in BUFR but not in FM18, some of these are moored buoys including 7 PIRATA or RAMA buoys which also report subsurface temperature and salinity (the subsurface BUFR data are not yet processed by ECMWF). More details of the marine data can be found in the E-SURFMAR pages (one issue is the move from 5-digit to 7-digit identifiers, this means that some newer buoys cannot really be coded using FM18). The plot below compares FM18 data with reports available in templates 315008 (moored buoys) and 315009 (drifting buoys). It does not include the moored buoys that currently report in TM13 (SHIP) code - at some point these will start using the 315008 template.
(Grey: TAC reports but no BUFR, Purple: BUFR reports but no TAC. Both TAC and BUFR: light blue - fewer BUFR, dark blue - similar numbers, green - more BUFR. Circles/triangles - drifting/moored buoys.)
Radiosonde coverage
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(Grey: TAC reports but no BUFR, Purple: BUFR reports but no TAC, Red *: position error. Blue: both BUFR and TAC, light blue indicates fewer ascents in BUFR. Triangle - ship report, X - wind-only report.)
It can be difficult to distinguish native BUFR from reformatted TEMP. The plot below (showing data received at the Met Office) shows distinguishes native BUFR (stations reporting valid radiosonde drift with a red halo, some Australian stations started sending native BUFR in July. Of the native BUFR reports about half have 300 or more levels.
The maximum number of levels reported gives some information on the resolution of the reports (1-29 grey; 30-99 light blue; 100-299 dark blue; 300-999 green; 1000-2999 orange; over 3000 cyan.)
positions): high/low resolution (dark/light blue, using 300 level threshold) from reformatted TEMP (orange). ECMWF recently started assimilating high resolution Australian reports.
