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 the following BUFR observations: SYNOP, SHIP, TEMP, TEMP SHIP, PILOT LAND, PILOT SHIP and AMDAR. 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 and will assimilate most of these shortly.
The most significant improvement provided at the moment from the NWP point of view is definitely due to the high-resolution radiosonde data and to highlight the importance of this milestone, reached after so many years of work on the TAC to BUFR migration, ECMWF has prepared a the following page summarising the quality of the new high resolution data as compared to the traditional TEMP: Statistics of High resolution BUFR TEMP.
Progress report on migration to BUFR, ECMWF, March 2015
Progress towards high-resolution, real-time radiosonde reports (BAMS, 2016)