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.

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

Please note, that additionally to the timeliness, coverage and data number information provided here, the NWP SAF NRT quality monitoring also provides information on data numbers and especially on data quality in comparisons to numerical model values.

Comments and suggestions on contents and display are welcome, please contact the NWP SAF User Helpdesk.

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

Data status monitoring

The data status monitoring allows users to get a quick overview of the data availability status of the monitored instruments by providing a table with traffic light indications of the data reception status. The status information is based on automatically cross-checking data number and timeliness changes occurring in both the Met Office and DWD monitoring systems for the jointly monitored instruments, therefore tracking general data provision and transmission issues rather than potential in-house delays in an individual service’s reception system. The overview is given per instrument and satellite and updated four times daily for data received in 6h time slots centered around 00, 06, 12, 18 UTC. Additionally to the current status, the history over the last 48h is also given. Further details with longer timeseries for the last 30 days can be found in the plots provided via the data timeliness monitoring page.

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.