The long-term objectives of this centralised system are to apply uniform quality controls to the input reflectivity and radial wind velocity polar data received from the radars, to redistribute every 5 minutes in the ODIM format (OPERA Data Information Model) the data received with quality indicator fields and to produce 2D and 3D composites of reflectivity and pan-European QPE products. A first version of the system with no QC producing maximum reflectivity, rainrates and hourly accumulation composites was developed in 2010 by The Met Office and Météo France, and was upgraded in 2012 with a toolbox built by BALTRAD that provided a QC framework together with QC algorithms. In this current fourth phase of OPERA, a collaborative development is taking place between many of the NMSs participating in the project to incorporate more QC procedures in the BALTRAD toolbox in order to meet NWP user needs on data quality and to improve further the quality of the composites.
In the mean time a number of the participating Met Services have developed their own centralised processing systems (United Kingdom, Germany, France, Switzerland ) to generate high quality QPE products, and have gained valuable knowledge and experience on how to design centralised processing systems incorporating state of the art dual-pol processing, and capable of generating products at much higher temporal and spatial resolution. Thanks to Odyssey, the experience gained at national level can be transferred to the European level to converge towards an optimal solution in the coming years.
In this paper, we will examine the lesson learned from this experience, what features are common to all these systems, and what future architecture Odyssey should have in 2020 to achieve a converged national-European solution or be a viable European complement to national solutions.
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