A new extra-large set of diverse atmospheric profiles has recently been compiled by the NWP SAF and is now available to the scientific community for the first time in nearly 10 years. Comprised of a year of ECMWF Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service (CAMS) forecast data on 137 levels, the profiles represent one of the most up-to-date estimates of the vertical structure of several significant meteorological variables, atmospheric gases, and aerosols. Each subset of 5000 thermodynamically consistent profiles is meticulously selected to form a microcosm of the full model, optimised for 20 important atmospheric variables. The dataset can be used to train or validate a variety of model applications. RadSim v4 – to be released soon – will be able to ingest this new dataset, supporting clear-sky, aerosol, and hydrometeor RTTOV simulations with these new profiles.

The 11th Analysis Report (AR11) of the NWP SAF AMV monitoring has been released and is available from the Analysis Reports section of the AMV monitoring webpages. The analysis reports identify features from the monitoring statistics and document how these evolve over time.
The status of existing features identified in the monitoring has been updated to reflect changes in the past two years. Several new data sets have been added to the monitoring since AR10. The assessment looks at NOAA-21 VIIRS AMVs, and the inclusion of DWD model data. Alongside these new data sets there have been changes in derivation methods including the rollout of NOAA’s enterprise algorithms. The impact of this change on the monitoring has been evaluated. Further investigation for some existing and new features has expanded our understanding of the cause of the difference between the AMVs and the model. These include the MSG positive bias over N. Africa, the positive speed bias in tropics for MSG and FY-2, and differences between Met Office, ECMWF and DWD statistics for Himawari.

The monitoring pages have been enhanced to include Meteosat 12 (MTG-I1) near real-time (NRT) radiance quality monitoring (Hovmoeller, time-averaged geographical mean, and time series plots) and Atmospheric Motion Vector (AMV) monthly monitoring (density, map, zonal, and vector plots). For more information, please visit:
Meteosat-12 FCI plots
AMV Monthly Monitoring

RTTOV v14.0 has been released. This is a major update to the software with numerous improvements and new features, including: changes to the representation of the atmospheric profile to improve consistency with NWP model fields; implementation of the microwave scattering science within RTTOV (the separate “RTTOV-SCATT” model no longer exists); improvements to the accuracy and speed of the MFASIS-NN fast visible cloud solver and support for additional channels; a new heterogeneous surface capability allowing multiple surface types to be associated with each profile; and support for the CAMEL v3 land surface emissivity atlases. The full list of updates is available here.

This release includes an additional module for processing level 1B data from the Arctic Weather Satellite (AWS1). It also adds support for MWHS-2 and MWTS-3 on FY-3F (hdf5 ingest and BUFR encoding), as well updating amsua_clparams.dat. For details, see the Release History.