Back at the start of the nineties EUMETSAT, the organization managing Europe’s meteorological satellites, was preparing the Meteostat Second Generation (MSG) satellites. At that time it decided to set up satellite-data application centers for different fields of meteorology and climatology. These centers would be awarded to diverse national meteorology services of Europe under the name of Satellite Application Facilities (SAF).

The first of these centers, given over to Nowcasting and Very Short Range Forecasting (shortened to NWC SAF ), was conceded in 1996 to Spain’s National Meteorology Institute (Instituto Nacional de Meteorología de España), now going under the name of AEMET.

Since 1998, under various contracts, GMV has been providing AEMET with services for the generation and maintenance of a data processing software package for the MSG program.

At the end of August this year AEMET published and distributed the new version of the SAF MSG package, supporting Nowcasting and Very Short Range Forecasting (SAFNWC/MSG). This new version phases in significant breakthroughs on the former version, contributing to a considerable improvement in humidity profiles and derived instability indices.

GMV has been responsible for all the following: implementation of the new precipitation processors, integration of the various processors developed by consortium members, verification of the new SAFNWC/MSG version and also supporting application users in all aspects of engineering (installation, configuration, operation, etc.)

Before its publication GMV installed the new system in the Reference Platform (Plataforma de Referencia), an operational production system installed in the central offices of AEMET; this platform acts as an SAFNWC/MSG reference framework for the various users; its products are displayed on SAFNWC’s Helpdesk .

The reference platform has also been fitted with a system for monitoring the quality of the products developed by GMV. This system extracts a set of quality indicators for the various products and generates daily, weekly and monthly trend graphs of these indicators to identify any type of deviation or degradation in the products generated.