NWC SAF/High Resolution Winds (HRW) as stand alone AMV calculation software

Abstract

The need to have a standalone AMV calculation software, easily usable and available to everybody, has been discussed at 38th and 39th CGMS meetings and also at the 10th International Winds Workshop. One of the main arguments was to provide both AMV and Research communities with a tool facilitating the research, testing and comparison of new AMV developments, which could improve the general quality of extracted AMVs. High Resolution Winds software (HRW) inside NWC SAF standalone software package is easy to obtain from the NWC SAF Helpdesk (after signing the corresponding Licence Agreement with EUMETSAT), easy to install, configure and run. It includes all routines and functions needed to process the corresponding MSG/SEVIRI HRIT images and NWP data, to calculate the Cloud products needed by its Height assignment (Cloud type, Cloud top temperature and height), and to calculate the corresponding AMVs. Its output is available in BUFR format, which with additional tools also available can be easily converted to other formats (like HDF5 or McIDAS MD files). It is currently only adapted to work with MSG data, but during CDOP-2 phase (2012-2017) its adaptation to other geostationary satellites is foreseen. The aim of this paper is to give a general presentation of how to use the existing NWC SAF/HRW software, and discuss its potential to provide a standalone AMV software as requested by the scientific AMV community.