On Tuesday, 8 November 2016 07:21:59 UTC, wrote:
Ogimet has developed an annoying habit lately of omitting 6-groups (rainfall) from its synops. As an example, see Kirkwall (03017) for yesterday (the 7th). I’m wondering if I’m missing rainfall thereby because, if so, it will be screwing up my Scottish rainfall records. UKMO say the synops they broadcast have all the 6-groups intact. I clicked on Ogimet’s “Contact” button and sent them a complaint, but just got a non-delivery message
Still, I suppose what you don’t pay for you can hardly complain about, as my sensible wife says.

Ian Bingham,
Inchmarlo, Aberdeenshire.
80m asl.

A big part of the problem (as far as I know) is that the Met Office issue observations in BufR format and OGIMET then convert them into SYNOP and these things may be lost in translation (all nine groups as well), although as you say it does seem to be happening more frequently these days.

Try re-downloading them the next day, sometimes the Met Office do send out corrections or missing observations (retards) which I think OGIMET then process.

I have lost count of the number of times that I have emailed the guy at OGIMET to say what a great job he is doing, and never had a reply. I even thought of translating my email into Spanish to see if that would elicit a response, maybe next time.

I'm in the same boat as you, last night for example there was no SYNOP for Exeter airport at 1800. I tried again just now and it's still missing. All I can think is that there is a comms outage even though it's only 3 miles from the Met Office HQ!

rantThe Met Office have spent a lot of time, money and effort maintaining a large database holding around a million or more observations for the WOW project for people in this country and around the world. A good deal of that data is slightly dubious meteorologically speaking, but they can't be bothered to provide a single FTP folder to hold the latest quality controlled SYNOP observation and climatological reports for the people of the UK to access. I'm obviously missing the point here, but I would trade a 150 or so good weather observations for all of the WOW reports any day./rant