NRT availability monitoring

The main aim of the near-real time availability monitoring is to provide information on data coverage, data timeliness and used data reception routes for key satellite data types from major international satellite agencies commonly used in NWP:

• MW and IR sounders (L1b radiances)
• IR hyperspectral sounders (L1b radiances)
• MW imagers (L1b radiances)
• AMVs from geostationary and polar orbiting satellites
• Wind vectors from scatterometers
• Wind speed from altimeters
• For monitoring of radio-occultation data, please refer to the ROM-SAF NRT monitoring pages.

The information on NRT data availability is structured into three parts:

This availability monitoring is still in active development.. The information provided will evolve further in the near future in terms of the plot types provided and the number of contributing centres. The page contents will be extended and adapted accordingly. Comments and suggestions on contents and display are welcome, please contact the NWP SAF User Helpdesk.

You can see which upcoming satellite instruments we plan to add to the NRT availability monitoring on the planned monitoring page.

Additionally, the NWP SAF NRT quality monitoring also provides information on data volumes as time series.

Data coverage monitoring

The geographical coverage plots allow a quick overview of currently available data by displaying the horizontal coverage within the four last 6 hour windows (i.e. the last 24 hours) grouped by main data and instrument types. Data coverage is provided by several NWP centres to allow comparison of received data. This is useful particularly in case of data outages or data transfer problems and allows faster tracking of underlying problems.

Data timeliness monitoring

It is becoming ever more important for NWP centres to judge whether the timeliness of the data is sufficient to meet the requirements of their applications. Particularly with the move towards use of rapid update very short range high resolution forecasting systems at several centres, information on data transfer times is important for defining the increasingly strict cut-off times.

The data transfer timeliness is monitored for the same data types, but in addition separately for the different satellite agencies and satellite platforms as data production and transmission schedules may differ. It analyzes and monitors the delay between observation time and the data reception in data banks. The timeliness statistics are made available for the most recent data as well as in the form of timeseries to allow checking for the stability of data reception. As for data coverage, there will be more than one centre providing these statistics, so that cross-checks on delay times are possible in case of arising issues.

Information on data reception routes

Satellite data are disseminated using different transmission channels. The channels used by the centres contributing to the NWP SAF NRT availabiliy monitoring are summarized on the data reception routes page. This provides information on how the different satellite data types can be accessed and received and additionally can be useful background information to judge possible systematic differences in timeliness experienced at different centres.