#37 French BUFR synops missing since 16th June

[Anonymous]

Good morning,
As of 09:00 on the 16th June, my version of metaf2xml stopped processing French bufr synops. I'm running version 2.3 which I appreciate is not the latest. Do you know what might have changed? I can see that online sources such as ogimet are still processing the French synops, so I assume that the BUFR binary files available from NOAA servers still contain them - but I'm not seeing any French sites when I process the files using:
BUFR_TABLES=/tmp /usr/bin/perl /opt/metaf2xml-2.3/bin/metafsrc2raw.pl -F bufr /var/observations/latestbufr1.bin | /usr/bin/perl /opt/metaf2xml-2.3/bin/metaf2xml.pl -o /var/observations/test.xml

I've updated the bufr tables to the latest available versions but it didn't help.

Thanks for any help you can provide
Dan Harding

[metaf2xml]

Hi Dan,

can you please attach an example for a file which fails to process?

Kind regards
Thomas

[Anonymous]

Hi Thomas, rather than attach the large file - I believe that this link is the bufr file available from noaa that has the French 14:00 UTC synops from today: https://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/SL.us008001/DF.bf/DC.intl/sn.0025.bin

[Anonymous]

And this file for the 15:00 UTC synops https://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/SL.us008001/DF.bf/DC.intl/sn.0030.bin

[metaf2xml]

Hi Dan,
thanks!
Are you using the BUFR tables release from https://confluence.ecmwf.int/display/BUFR/Releases ? The latest release was "000409" from 2019, and this is missing all newer BUFR table versions of the WMO. Did you apply all newer changes published on this page? Maybe France has started to use more recent versions.
Maybe you can check what is printed to STDERR for the first command, metafsrc2raw.pl. Does it say something like "Couldn't find BUFR table"? If yes, then you need to update the BUFR tables to a newer version. As the ECMWF does not publish updates to BUFRDC anymore, I'd recommend to use their releases on https://confluence.ecmwf.int/display/ECC/. With the latest release 2.47.0, all messages from sn.0030.bin could be parsed, except for 2 with the error "Cannot handle BUFR edition 12" (which does not exist). This file contains messages with BUFR table versions up to 43, published in November 2024, which I believe is also the latest one. From the tar.gz, you only need the files in eccodes-2.47.0-Source/definitions/bufr/tables, and the BUFR_TABLES environment variable should contain the directory path to this directory.
Kind regards
Thomas

[metaf2xml]

Please note that if you use the ECC tables, you either need metaf2xml version 2.7+, or you just apply this diff to metaf2xml/src2raw.pl:

     }

+    Geo::BUFR->set_tableformat('ECCODES');
     Geo::BUFR->set_tablepath($ENV{BUFR_TABLES});

[metaf2xml]

Actually, it is sufficient to extract the files *.distinct and *.TXT in bufrdc-wmo-v42-v43-v44.tar.gz from https://confluence.ecmwf.int/display/BUFR/Releases into some new subdirectory and point BUFR_TABLES to this directory. I just tried, and the messages produced with metaf2xml 2.3 and these BUFRDC files are identical to the ones produced with metaf2xml 2.11 and the latest ECC BUFR files.

[metaf2xml]

I checked the BUFR information for 07627 on Ogimet, and yes, the Master table version was increased. In the file for 2026-06-16 09:00, the version is 22, in the file one hour later, the version is 38. So if you use the files in bufrdc-wmo-v42-v43-v44.tar.gz from https://confluence.ecmwf.int/display/BUFR/Releases, messages should be decoded again.