The Satellite Application Facility for Numerical Weather Prediction (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 2026 is open for registration - September 10, 2025
This course provides a comprehensive overview of the usage of meteorological satellite observations in operational numerical weather prediction (NWP). 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. Applications for this course close on 30 November 2025 For further information, please visit https://events.ecmwf.int/event/499/ - Update to the monthly AMV monitoring - July 21, 2025
The monthly AMV monitoring web pages, https://nwp-saf.eumetsat.int/site/monitoring/winds-quality-evaluation/amv/amv-monthly-monitoring/, have been updated to include O-B plots against the DWD global model background. This enables further comparison of AMV departures with the existing plots from the Met Office and ECMWF and will help separate error contributions between the observations and the models. The DWD statistics are available for the map, zonal, and density (2D histograms) plots. - RadSim v4.0 released - July 17, 2025
RadSim v4.0 has been released. This has been updated to work with RTTOV v14.0. New features include: support for ingest of the new NWP SAF 137L CAMS profile dataset, and also the older 60L MACC and CAMS profile datasets; support for ingest of ICON-ART model fields including the aerosol species supported by RTTOV; support for nearest-neighbour instead of (bi)linear spatial and temporal interpolation; support for Zeeman-enabled simulations; support for obs data files in netCDF format; ecCodes is now an optional dependency, only required if ingesting model fields in GRIB format. A full list of updates is here. - FY-3E HIRAS and FY-4B GIIRS Monitoring Update - July 7, 2025
The monitoring of the Chinese hyperspectral infrared sounders HIRAS on board the LEO platform FY-3E and GIIRS on board the GEO platform FY-4B are now available from the NWP SAF monitoring page: https://nwp-saf.eumetsat.int/site/monitoring/nrt-monitoring/ - AAPP update 8.15 has been released - July 1, 2025
This release includes a bug fix for Arctic Weather Satellite (AWS) processing to l1c and the addition of a new python script aapp_BUFR_quicklook.py to plot AWS BUFR data (as well as other microwave sounder BUFR data). Additionally amsua_clparams.dat has been updated, new satellites added into ‘get_tle’ script, and use of the gcc14 gfortran compiler is now supported. For details, see the Release History.