The Numerical Predicition Division (NPD) of Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) has been working on TDCF migration of both surface and upper-air reports.

Surface

Use in NWP

 

Trouble cases

Missing pressure for geopotential height

Starting at 11Z 23 January 2014, the SYNOP BUFR reports from the station 07497 BOURG ST-MAURICE contained:

These values were decoded into 16 bit signed integers.  The missing value was converted to minimum possible value (-32768e1 Pa).  Unfortunately that was treated as valid value since geopotential was not missing.  Then that caused floating point exception in computation of power of (now negative!) pressure.  In the TAC (traditional alphanumeric) reports it was safely assumed geopotential is always missing when pressure is missing.  We are not monitoring later reports regarding this issue, as the NWP system was fixed immediately.  We also contacted the originating country, and they say it will be fixed.

Upper-air

Analysis of incoming data

Format/Headers/Stations as of 2015-01-13

description of algorithm to tell code form and parts

Use in NWP

Trouble cases

Geopotential height for US TEMP BUFR

Starting February 2014, most of U.S. TEMP BUFR reports contained unnatural geopotential height.  This issue is explained detail in Errors in BUFR radiosonde data page by FNMOC.

Japan's TEMP BUFR

A few problems were found in TEMP BUFR reports sent from Tokyo.  The TAC-BUFR conversion at RTH Tokyo has to be amended to get rid of the situation, and it is not possible to show specific schedule for now.

The issues are "missing top digit of data", lost in TAC encoding.