Global Upper Air Radiosonde Binary Universal Form for the Representation of meteorological data (BUFR) archive from ECMWF

This is a dataset of high resolution upper air soundings collected by European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) Binary Universal Form for the Representation of meteorological data (BUFR) format. The parameters and metadata captured at each level contain time displacement, latitude displacement, longitude displacement, geopotential height, pressure, temperature, dew point temperature, wind speed, wind direction, level significance (flags). Many reports are at 2-second resolution ~3500 levels for a full ascent, some are at 1-second resolution: ~7000 levels (but we have seen up to 14500 levels). Few observations in this data set are at low resolution (standard+significant levels). That data are from Oct 2, 2014 - present, updated monthly.

In 2003, the WMO members approved a migration from traditional alphanumeric codes (TAC)to table driven code forms (TDCF) BUFR for data distribution on the Global Telecommunications System (GTS). The TDCF BUFR, also known as just BUFR, is a binary data format maintained by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Compared with the traditional alphanumeric codes (TAC), the BUFR offers great advantages of flexibility and expandability, allowing for the dissemination of much higher vertical resolution with the reporting of the time and position at each level and extra metadata. The Commission agreed on the deadline of November 2014 to stop the parallel distribution of TAC and BUFR data. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) has maintained an archive of global radiosonde BUFR data since October of 2014, which will complement NCEI's real-time archiving of National Weather Service (NWS) BUFR stream commencing in May of 2017.