E-PROFILE GROUND-BASED MICROWAVE RADIOMETER NETWORK: TOWARDS OPERATIONAL REAL-TIME THERMODYNAMIC PROFILING AT THE EUROPEAN SCALE

E. Sauvageat¹, R. Rüfenacht¹, D. Turner², M. Turp³, D. Cimini^4,5, B. Pospichal⁶, A. Haefele¹

¹Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss, Payerne, Switzerland, ²NOAA Global Systems Laboratory, Boulder, USA, ³Met Office, Exeter, United Kingdom, ⁴National Research Council of Italy, Institute of Methodologies for Environmental Analysis (CNR-IMAA), Potenza, Italy, ⁵Center of Excellence CETEMPS, University of L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italy, ⁶Institute for Geophysics and Meteorology, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

E-Profile is the EUMETNET observation programme that collects, processes and disseminates atmospheric vertical profiles of wind, aerosols and clouds in near real-time, focusing on operational meteorology. Building on a business case published in its previous phase (2019-2023), E-Profile now expands its profiling capabilities with the setup of an operational network of ground-based microwave radiometers (MWRs) dedicated to humidity and temperature profiling. MWRs are mostly sensitive to the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) and can operate under cloudy conditions, which makes them good complement to satellite observations in the context of data assimilation. The synchronous measurements of humidity and temperature also allow for the derivation of Stability and Forecast Indices (FI) at high temporal resolution from MWR, which is of particular interest for forecasters in rapidly evolving convective situations.

Since early 2024, E-Profile operates a pilot network of 16 instruments from 7 European countries and 3 different manufacturers, providing continuous measurement of K- and V-band brightness temperatures (L1) at high time resolution (seconds) and with relevant timeliness (10-90 min for most instruments). Following recent updates to the reading and conversion software, the distribution of the L1 products in near real-time is due to start soon.

In addition, work is ongoing to finalize the retrieval setup and prepare the distribution of humidity and temperature profiles (L2) from the MWR observations. For the retrievals, we rely on TROPoe, a 1D-Var retrieval software based upon optimal estimation. The processing is done centrally and in near real-time on the European Weather Cloud (EWC), for now restricted to a subset of the 16 pilot instruments, but with the aim to process all by the end of 2025.

In this contribution, we present the latest developments and current status of the E-Profile MWR network. It includes the tools setup for the monitoring of the data quality as well as the first results from over a year of continuous operation of our pilot network. We also show the challenges associated with setting up harmonized real-time processing for different type of MWR and discuss the remaining work and improvements.