Odyssey, which went live in January 2011, has the ability to ingest raw polar volume radar products from almost two hundred operational weather radars operated by European National Meteorological and Hydrological Services. In April 2011, Odyssey was receiving data from 13 National Meteorological Services (UK, France, Iceland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Serbia, Germany and Spain), potentially supplying data from one hundred and twenty operational radars. Composites of rain-rate, maximum reflectivity and hourly accumulations are produced every 15 minutes at 2 km resolution. Odyssey's algorithms have been designed to process data in a consistent way, allowing Odyssey to generate homogenous radar products for the whole European domain, in full compliance with the demanding user requirements for timeliness and availability. The challenges that had to be faced in the development phase were 1) to guarantee a high-level of quality of the compositing method and 2) to optimise the performances of the software, both in terms of CPU and memory used. The requirement is that raw radar data from across Europe is decoded, processed, projected and mosaicked in less than 5 minutes. Shared operational provision of Odyssey across two centres, Météo France and the Met Office, provides high levels of operational resilience.
Availability and timeliness monitoring of incoming data and the Odyssey composites takes place independently at the EIG EUMETNET EUCOS Quality Management Portal (QMP) hosted at Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD).
Odysssey being by the end of 2011 a Data Processing and Collecting Centre (DCPC) of the WMO GISC, access to Odyssey input data and products will be easy. Another challenge for OPERA and EUMETNET as a whole is the development of a data policy for Odyssey products. An expert team has established a set of recommendations to be presented to the EUMETNET Assembly for ratification in May 2011. This agreement will establish the way forward for the release of Odyssey products to a wide user base, including different communities such as NWP, Aviation and Hydrology.
The first operational composites produced only have basic data pre-processing applied. Using expertise within OPERA and elsewhere (within BALTRAD for example), the pre-processing will be further upgraded and quality measures improved, to create higher value composite products. The NWP community is already putting some pressure on OPERA to enrich the metadata related to the input data (e.g. distinguish between ground-clutter-classified and noise-classified pixels) and to improve the quality of the products (reduce the frequency of artefacts). The first pre-processing algorithm planned to be included in the Odyssey from 2012 will be the Anomaly detection and removal (AnDRe) from the FMI and BALTRAD. Further ahead, future versions of the ODC composites will have improved temporal and spatial resolutions, as well a third dimension (i.e. towards 3D composites).
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