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/

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 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.

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: 

1. 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.
2. Spatial averaging capability, applicable to UPP BUFR files, in order to reduce instrument noise.

The second point is now fully supported by the Microwave Imager Pre-processor (MWIPP) which supersedes that of the SSMIS PP. As such the NWP SAF SSMIS PP package will  be retired, and support will no longer be offered upon the release of MWIPP v2 in April  2025.

For all additional information, please refer to SSMIS PP web pages https://nwp-saf.eumetsat.int/site/software/ssmis-pp/ and MWIPP web pages https://nwp-saf.eumetsat.int/site/software/mwipp/ or contact the team via the NWP SAF Helpdesk https://nwp-saf.eumetsat.int/site/help-desk/.   

Kind regards,

The NWP SAF team.

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/.