Hi,
why the Quality of Surface Pressure for instance for Juba (South Sudan) on 4 May 2021 12 UTC is indicated in case the selected Monitoring Centre is DWD but not for ECMWF (see attached screenshots)?
Cheers,
Alessandro Chiariello (WMO Nairobi)
Hi,
why the Quality of Surface Pressure for instance for Juba (South Sudan) on 4 May 2021 12 UTC is indicated in case the selected Monitoring Centre is DWD but not for ECMWF (see attached screenshots)?
Cheers,
Alessandro Chiariello (WMO Nairobi)
Dear Alessandro,
Thank you very much for your question. It actually highlighted a couple of issues that we need to address. One, the WDQMS webtool documentation and the other, ECMWF choices that lead to missing out observations from a station.
Station 62941 (Juba) does not appear in ECMWF quality charts because ECMWF didn't receive observations from this station during the selected period. You can confirm this on the ECMWF availability chart where Juba is displayed as a black dot (not received in the period). The quality maps don´t show any dots for a station if this station didn’t report any data (black dot in the availability map). See information in the users guide under 3.2 Data quality, paragraph below table 5 (https://confluence.ecmwf.int/display/WIGOSWT/3.2+Data+quality).
On the other hand, the reason for ECMWF "not receiving" observations from this station has to do with the fact that these messages are not going through the Central African GTS hubs (in the past HSSJ and HSSS were used). They are available from KWBC/Washington, but ECMWF has stoped processing reports from this route last year because of too many re-formatted reports being distributed. ECMWF will re-enable the AF block ( eg S*AF0* KWBC) from KWBC/Washington so that observations from this station can be processed and used in ECMWF data assimilation system. Ideally, the reports should be distributed by the Central African hub. Do you think you could help in achieving this?
Regards,
Cristina Prates
Dear Cristina,
thank you a lot for the reply and clear explanation. I am getting familiar with this system, hence I miss many things. The takeway from your explanation, besides clarifying the issue itself, is that the WDQMS provides the status of the observations (availability and/or quality) with respect to one or more GPC within the group (ECMWF, NCEP, DWD and JMA). I believe I am not the only one thinking that these figures, i.e. availability and quality, are just there like magics and do not know the actual process behind.
Cheers,
Alessandro