AAPP Future Plans

Future Plans

If users would like to see specific functionality added to AAPP, please contact the Help Desk to submit your suggestions.

Planned developments include:

 

Metop-A/B/C

Continued support for the instruments on Metop, up to the end of life of Metop-C (i.e. late 2020s or early 2030s).

Metop-SG – pre-processing

Pre-processing for MWS, IASI-NG and METimage instruments on Metop-SG-A1, scheduled for launch in the second half of 2025. See the following documents:
Design proposals for EPS-SG pre-processing in AAPP and MWIPP (June 2021, updated November 2024)
AAPP v9 Top Level Design (May 2022)
AAPP v9 Product Specification (May 2022)
Technical report: Adapting the AAPP microwave tests for EPS-SG (May 2022)
Technical report: Adapting the AAPP microwave tests for EPS-SG: part 2 – surface tests (Aug 2022)

Metop-SG – direct broadcast level 1 processors

For direct broadcast, the conversion from raw to level 1b will not be part of AAPP, it will be performed by seperate software that is being procured by EUMETSAT and will be distributed by the NWP SAF. But we provide information on this page, as some of the outputs from the direct broadcast processors feed into AAPP.

Many of the details are discussed in EUMETSAT’s Metop-SG Direct Readout Guide and in the three documents linked from the bottom of that page.

Here is an extract from an ITSC-25 poster (6p.02) by Booton et al., explaining the status as of May 2025:

AAPP Future Plans

For more information, please contact the NWP SAF.

Arctic Weather Satellite and EPS-Sterna

The Arctic Weather Satellite (AWS-1) was launched by ESA in August 2024. Global data for the microwave radiometer (MWR) are distributed by EUMETSAT, and AAPP v8.14 includes a module to process the level 1B data (including re-mapping and BUFR encoding). A test case will be provided with AAPP v8.15. Level 1B data are in netCDF format with different geolocation (lat, lon, etc.) for the four feedhorns. See the AAPP-AWS User manual.

Direct Broadcast software (level 0 to level 1B) is being procured by ESA. When ready (expected mid-2025), it is intended that the package will be made available to users via the NWP SAF web site, subject to suitable licensing arrangements.

For the follow-on EPS-Sterna constellation, planned from 2029 onwards (if the programme is approved by EUMETSAT Council), responsibility for level 0 to 1B software will fall to EUMETSAT. It is expected that AAPP will continue to support these instruments in a similar way to Arctic Weather Satellite.

A clarification on EUMETSAT’s plans for future changes to Multi Mission Administration Messages (MMAM)

We don’t believe that the changes outlined below will affect AAPP functionality, but are including the information (received October 2025) for completeness.

For the existing Metop-B and C MMAM, EUMETSAT plans to remove from the MMAM content the following (at a date not yet determined):

  • User announcement info: available via UNS tool (User Notification Service)
  • Instrument status: available via the User Portal EUMETSAT – User Portal)
  • TLEs: available via the website (Two Line Elements)

There will be no change to the NAVATT equivalent information, i.e. ANX, State Vectors, Ephemeris, Yaw Steering coefficients, Attitude Bias, OBT-UTC correlation.

For EPS-SG, it is proposed not to activate the MMAM (i.e. no generation of the MMAM and no provision via direct broadcast or any other means) since:

  • On EPS-SG there is a NAVATT stream via X-band, which is separate from the MMAM stream via X-band. The NAVATT stream contains the attitude and navigation information (which are used by the L1 processors).
  • The user announcement info, instrument status and TLEs will be available on the UNS tool / EUMETSAT website / User Portal.