Satellite Application Facility for Numerical Weather Prediction

The NWP SAF aims to improve and support the interface between satellite data/products and European activities in NWP.

The NWP SAF is one of several EUMETSAT SAFs (Satellite Application Facilities). Utilising specialist expertise from the Member States, SAFs are dedicated centres of excellence for processing satellite data and form an integral part of the distributed EUMETSAT Application Ground Segment. Further information about SAFs is available on the EUMETSAT web site.

The SAF for NWP interacts, where appropriate, with related work in other SAFs and in other EUMETSAT activities in order to enhance collaboration and to minimise duplication of effort.

Recent News and Updates

  • NWP SAF Satellite Data Assimilation Training Course - December 1, 2023
    The next NWP SAF satellite data assimilation training course will take place at ECMWF, Reading, on 11-15 March 2024. The course provides a complete overview of the usage of meteorological satellite observations in operational numerical weather prediction. It includes a series of lectures and practical sessions covering a range of topics – from fundamental theoretical concepts through to detailed practical implementations in modern state-of-the-art data assimilation systems. Registration for this course closes on Monday, 18 December 2023. More information on https://events.ecmwf.int/event/375/
  • AAPP update 8.12 has been released - October 5, 2023
    The update includes calibration updates for AMSU-A, DBNet station updates, addition of JPSS-2 and FY-3E to satid.txt and corrections to level 1d BUFR encoding for FY-3. Also some cosmetic changes due to internal migration from Subversion to Git. For details, see https://nwp-saf.eumetsat.int/site/software/aapp/documentation/release-history/.
  • RadSim v3.2 released - July 27, 2023
    RadSim v3.2 has been released. This has been updated to work with RTTOV v13.2 and enables new RTTOV features including the MFASIS-NN (neural network based fast visible/near-IR cloud solver), the new polarisation treatment in RTTOV-SCATT, and the new SURFEM-Ocean microwave sea surface emissivity model.  A full list of updates is available here.
  • NWP SAF SSMIS PP package retirement - June 15, 2023
    Dear NWP SAF user, The SSMIS Pre-processing Package (SSMIS PP) currently supplied and maintained by the NWP SAF processes data from the SSMIS instruments on board the US Defence Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP). There are two aspects to the processing in SSMIS PP:  Handling the “LAS”, “UAS”, “IMG” and “ENV” BUFR files and detecting instrument anomalies, for DMSP F16 only. This aspect is now obsolete as the Unified Pre-processor (UPP – maintained by the US Naval Research Laboratory) routinely performs this step for all functioning SSMIS instruments. Spatial averaging capability, applicable to UPP BUFR files, in order to reduce instrument […]
  • NRT availability monitoring update - May 25, 2023
    The near-real-time data availability monitoring has been updated to provide coverage and timeliness plots based on DWD reception for the geostationary radiances and AMVs from Himawari-9, GOES-18, MTEOSAT-10 as well as microwave radiances from MWTS-3 and MWHS-2 on the early morning orbit satellite FY-3E. Please visit the NRT availability monitoring web pages to access the plots https://nwp-saf.eumetsat.int/site/monitoring/nrt-availability/.

For older news, see the News Archive.