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A technical change was implemented at ECMWF in the operational production on Tuesday 11 November 2014, in order to allow active assimilation of observations received in BUFR format.

The observation types affected are SYNOP,SHIP, TEMP, TEMP SHIP, PILOT LAND, PILOT SHIP and AMDAR.

Most of the data are still under monitoring and will be actively assimilated only if the equivalent TAC data are missing or if they are deemed to improve the forecast performance.
At the moment ECMWF is actively assimilating the following data received in BUFR

surface observations from United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland and Nederlands, due to the announcement of switch off of TAC.
upper air observations from Germany, because they are high resolution profiles.
E-ASAP observations which are being terminated in TAC format
E-AMDAR data for which a switch off of the TAC format has been announced.

The most significant improvement provided at the moment from the NWP point of view is definitely due to the high-resolution radiosonde data and to highlight the importance of this milestone, reached after so many years of work on the TAC to BUFR migration, ECMWF has prepared a the following page summarising the quality of the new high resolution data as compared to the traditional TEMP: Statistics of High resolution BUFR TEMP.