The Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder (SSMIS) is a passive conically scanning microwave radiometer that takes measurements at 24 discrete frequencies between 19 and 183 GHz with a swath width of 1700 km.

Each SSMIS Sensor Data Product, which contains one orbit of data, is reformatted to produce 4 BUFR products, namely: Imaging (IMA), Environmental (ENV), Lower Atmospheric Sounding (LAS) and Upper Atmospheric Sounding (UAS).

Users are referred to the SSMIS product format description (PDF, 856 KB)

The file naming convention will follow the WMO standard and files will be compressed using bzip2:
W_XX-EUMETSAT-Darmstadt,SOUNDING+SATELLITE,<sat_ID>+SSMIS_C_EUMS_<YYYYMMDDhhmmss>_Ehhmm_<sub_instrument>.bin.bz2

Where
<sat_ID> is a string that identifies the satellite and will take the values DMSPF16 or DMSPF17;
<YYYYMMDDhhmmss> is the time of the first observation as year, month, day, hours, minutes and seconds. Information not available will be replaced by --;
Ehhmm is the end time of the data; <sub_instrument> indicates which sub-instrument observations are in the file and will take the values IMAGER, ENVIRO, LAS or UAS.

Approximate file sizes are as follows:

• Imaging Product: 7.1 Mbytes
• Environmental Product: 5.1 Mbytes
• LAS Product: 0.2 Mbytes
• UAS Product: 1.6 Mbytes

These products are created with full resolution Level 1 data with global coverage.

The EUMETCast Europe details are as follows:
 
Channel: EUMETSAT Data Channel 4
PID: 500
Multicast Address: 224.223.222.27

Test data can be found on our FTP site.

Users should register for these products via the  EO Portal.

For further information, please contact our User Service Helpdesk.

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