Missing NZ Upper Air Stations in WDQMS

Missing NZ Upper Air Stations in WDQMS

by Kevin Alder -
Number of replies: 3

Good morning,

I have recently noticed that WDQMS is no longer showing statistics for the New Zealand upper air stations.

Whenuapai    0-20000-0-93112
Paraparaumu 0-20000-0-93417
Lauder            0-20000-0-93817
Invercargill      0-20000-0-93844

One silent station (Raoul Island 0-20000-0-93997) is shown.

Could you please investigate.

Kind regards,
Kevin Alder


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In reply to Kevin Alder

Re: Missing NZ Upper Air Stations in WDQMS

by Cristina Prates -
Dear Kevin,

Thank you very much for reporting this. I did check the information on WDQMS and I can confirm that NWP Centers are sending the statistics from the NZ stations (switch to quality on the monitoring category and you will be able to see them). However, there is a problem with the availability as these stations are no longer identified as upper-air stations (you can see them as yellow dots, which means the NWP Ids cannot be matched to the WSI extracted from OSCAR/Surface) except for Raoul Island 0-20000-0-93997 (black dot, meaning not reporting). I investigated a bit further and found out that according to the information stored in WDQMS database (retrieved daily from OSCAR/Surface) these stations are closed since 2 December 2021 (see below). And in fact, if you compare the availability maps on 2/12 with 3/12, the green dots turned into yellow dots for the NZ stations. I think you will need to check the stations' metadata in OSCAR/Surface and probably revert the changes made on the 2nd of December 2021.

Please be aware that it takes 24h to see the changes in OSCAR/Surface reflected on WDQMS maps and lLet me know if you encounter any further problem.

Kind regards,

Cristina Prates
In reply to Cristina Prates

Re: Missing NZ Upper Air Stations in WDQMS

by Kevin Alder -

Hi Cristina,

Thank you very much for your assistance - I have modified the entries for the stations concerned in OSCAR, and will now monitor WDQMS to make sure they appear there in the next day or two.

I had previously thought that the entry "Aerological Soundings" in OSCAR was the correct way to describe radiosonde stations, and made those edits on December. I haven now reverted those entries. 

Kind regards

Kevin

In reply to Kevin Alder

Re: Missing NZ Upper Air Stations in WDQMS

by Cristina Prates -

Hi Kevin,

I can confirm that your changes fixed the problem. The system updates the metadata daily around 7 UTC, so they have just got uploaded into WDQMS. All NZ stations are displayed in green on the availability maps.

Thanks for the prompt action to fix the issue.

Regards,

Cristina