Following the operational start of EUMETSAT's commercial radio occultation third party data service and the distribution of the BUFR data on EUMETCast from 14 February 2022, the data will start being distributed on the GTS on 6 April 2022. The data will be released under an updated global data license.
This will be associated with a change to the BUFR products, also affecting the BUFR products distributed on EUMETCast.
The change wraps the BUFR messages into bulletin headers which are required for distribution via the GTS. As a result of the change, there will be up to 14 different area codes in the filenames and bulletin headers. This results in a change in the filenames. Note: The BUFR messages and their content will remain the same.
At the moment, an example of a typical filename is as follows:
W_XX-EUMETSAT-Darmstadt,SOUNDING+SATELLITE,SPIRE+FM104_C_EUMS_20210624151421_G01_L1B_BND____N_O.bin,
thus containing the Spire satellite number (FM104) as well as the occulting GNSS PRN (Pseudo-random noise) (G01).
Following the change, the new filename convention will be:
W_XX-EUMETSAT-Darmstadt,SOUNDING+SATELLITE,SPIRE+LEMUR_C_EUMS_<start_time>_IUT<a>14_<tstamp>_L1B_BND____N_O.bin
where <start_time> denotes a 14-digit timestamp of the earliest occultation inside the BUFR file, <a> a WMO BUFR area code (one of A-L, N, S or X), and <tstamp> the WMO BUFR generation timestamp. The latter is a six-digit string of the form DDHHMM with DD, HH and MM denoting the day of the month, hour of the day, and minute of the hour, respectively.
An example of the new filename is as follows:
W_XX-EUMETSAT-Darmstadt,SOUNDING+SATELLITE,SPIRE+LEMUR_C_EUMS_20220202130513_IUTK14_201522_L1B_BND____N_O.bin
A BUFR test data set demonstrating these changes can be found on:
https://sftp.eumetsat.int/public/folder/UsCVknVOOkSyCdgpMimJNQ/User-Materials/Test-Data/Commercial_RO/
There is also an .md5 checksum file in the same directory.
Note: Updated test data set uploaded on 05/04/2022
The GTS abbreviated bulletin headers are: IUT[A-LNS]14 EUMS.
For more information, contact our User Service Helpdesk.
