Regional ATOVS Retransmission Services (RARS)

RARS implementation approach

First global RARS Workshop

A first CGMS-WMO Global RARS workshop was held at EUMETSAT in Darmstadt on 16-17 December 2004.

The main objectives of the workshop were:

• To consolidate the requirements for ATOVS data (e.g. timeliness and coverage);

• To define a global RARS network capable of meeting these requirements;
• To facilitate the implementation of such a global RARS network.

The main results/conclusions from the workshop were:

• A need was identified for two additional RARS covering:
  • The Asia-Pacific region;
  • The South American region.
• An agreement on the common use of the AAPP processing software - for further details on the AAPP software see the NWP SAF web site (access through on-line registration);
• A requirement for standards in a number of areas (e.g. version of processing software, format conversion, quality tagging of data, service management, etc) to ensure consistency of the global RARS dataset.

Follow-on activities

The results of the first workshop led to a number of follow-on activities, including:

• Further definition of the Asia-Pacific RARS at the APSDEU-6 meeting in Seoul on 1-3 June 2005;
• Further definition of the South American RARS at a dedicated workshop in Buenos Aires on 6-7 September 2005;
• Progress towards the Asia-Pacific RARS implementation with a trial exchange of data;
• Definition of the first draft of the RARS Operator standards.

Two further workshops were held in the following two years. A RARS Implementation Group (RARS-IG) was formed in 2007 to provide overview and guidance on the development of RARS. The RARS-IG met in Geneva on 5-6 July 2007, again in Geneva on 21-22 May 2008, then in Tolyo on 5-6 February 2009.

Within the RARS project WMO acts as a central coordinator/facilitator and arranges meetings and workshops in order to assist in the implementation. Aspects requiring global co-ordination are addressed by the RARS-IG. Other important issues, requiring mainly regional co-ordination, are addressed either by the RARS-IG or within existing meeting frameworks (e.g. the annual Asia-Pacific Satellite Data Exchange and Utilisation (APSDEU) meetings in the case of the Asia-Pacific RARS). In addition, for each region, RARS co-ordinators have been appointed to address any RARS implementation actions on a day-to-day basis.

The two main Data Exchange and Utilisation meetings (APSDEU and the North America/Europe Data Exchange and Utilisation Meeting) also address data exchange requirements between regions and maintain their own databases of requirements. To ensure consistency of the RARS requirements database, an annual comparison is made between all these databases (for ATOVS data requirements only).

Reference Documents

Reports from all meetings related to the RARS project may be viewed on the Space Programme Meeting Reports page at http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/sat/Reports.html

The following document contains a description of the initial RARS concept:
A global network of Regional ATOVS Retransmission Services (RARS) by M.Dumont, J. Lafeuille, A.Soerensen. Paper presented at the 15th International TOVS Study Conference (ITOVS XV, Maratea, October 2006).

Updates were provided by D. Griersmith at the 16th International TOVS Study Conference (ITOVS XVI, Angra dos Reis, Brazil, May 2008) and by Christelle Ponsard at NOAA's 2008 Satellite Direct Readout Conference (Miami, Florida, USA, 8-12 December 2008).

Other pages of this RARS section

• RARS concept
• RARS motivation, background and benefits
• Current implementation status
• RARS data quality monitoring
• RARS data coding summary
• How to access RARS data
• RARS contacts and links

Back to top