Eumetsat "SAF to support to Nowcasting and Very Short Range Forecasting" (SAFNWC) is hosted by the Spanish Meteorological Institute (AEMet). The objective of this SAF is to develop an operational software package to produce 12 products (aiming to support nowcasting applications) using data from the future Eumetsat MSG and EPS meteorological satellites. Four weather services are involved in this SAF: AEMet (Spanish weather service), SMHI (Swedish weather service), ZAMG (Austrian weather service) and Météo-France.
The Centre de Météorologie Spatiale (CMS) of Météo-France is responsible for the development and scientific maintenance of software modules that allows to extract 3 cloud parameters (CMa: cloud mask, CT: cloud types, CTTH: cloud top temperature and height) from MSG SEVIRI imagery over European areas. This cloud software is part of the SAFNWC software package developed under INM' s responsibility.
As the SAFNWC software should have been ready very soon after MSG launch (initially planned in October 2000), prototypes using existing meteorological satellite data (AVHRR and GOES-East imagery, whose channels are listed in table below) have been developed during the first development phase (1997-1999), both to validate algorithms and to check the technical feasibility of real-time processing (report available on this web site). Products elaborated with the GOES prototype have been made available to users during a SAFNWC Demonstration Experiment in November 1999 (these products are still available on this web site, but are now extracted using the last version of the SAFNWC software).
The final algorithm has been elaborated during a second development phase in 2000, taking advantage of experience gained during the prototyping phase; the use of radiative transfer model to tune algorithms during the prototyping phase has allowed a fast and easy tuning to MSG SEVIRI spectral characteristics. This algorithm has been implemented in SAFNWC software version V0.0, available in early 2002.
MSG's launch has been delayed beyond mid-2002, thus allowing some more development efforts to improve the SEVIRI algorithms. Since 2000, measurements having spectral characteristics similar to SEVIRI have been available from the MODIS radiometer (on board two polar-orbiting satellites called EOS (TERRA or AQUA)). These measurements have been used in 2001-2002 to check and enhance the algorithm and software (report available on the web site), leading to an improved algorithm implemented in SAFNWC software version V0.1 version available mid 2003.
|
SEVIRI |
Present Meteosat |
GOES-8 imagery |
AVHRR-3 |
MODIS |
|
VIS0.6 |
[0.4µm-1.1µm] |
X |
X |
X |
|
VIS0.8 |
|
X |
X |
|
|
NIR1.6 |
|
|
X |
X |
|
IR3.9 |
|
X |
X |
X |
|
IR8.7 |
|
|
|
X |
|
IR10.8 |
[10.5µm-12.5µm] |
X |
X |
X |
|
IR12.0 |
X |
X |
X |
|
|
WV6.2 |
[5.7µm-7.1µm] |
6.7µm |
|
X |
|
WV7.3 |
|
|
|
X |
|
IR9.7 |
|
|
|
X |
|
IR13.4 |
|
|
|
X |
|
HRV |
|
|
|
|
Comparison of channel availability on AVHRR, GOES, MODIS and MSG SEVIRI imagery.
The users received the first disseminated SEVIRI image in April 2003, which could be sucessfully processed with software version v0.1.
SEVIRI became operational in February 2004. The first software version tuned with SEVIRI images (v1.0) was available to user in May 2004 and a fully validated version (v1.2) one year later (see the validation report).
A SAFNWC users' workshop has been held in Madrid in Autumn 2005 which has allowed to identify and set priorities amongst the users's needs for the next period (2007-2012).
The following main developments are planned during the 2007-2012 period: