Migration to the BUFR data format was completed in 2010, and dual dissemination of BUFR and TAC was terminated in 2014. Meteorological observations such as SYNOP, TEMP, PILOT, or CLIMAT should no longer be disseminated in the TAC data format.
Furthermore, in accordance with ICAO Annex 3, Amendment 81, it is mandatory to exchange OPMET data (METAR/SPECI, TAF, SIGMET, AIRMET, Advisories) in the IWXXM data format (while still disseminating them also in the TAC data format). The dual dissemination is currently expected to be terminated in 2029.
Recode Weather comes with the full support of BUFR and IWXXM (incl. version 2023-1), allowing you to convert TAC messages to BUFR/IWXXM and vice versa.
Without reliable support of BUFR and/or IWXXM in your systems, you cannot communicate with the rest of the meteorological world, understand the data received, or send data to others. At the same time, it is obvious that migrating to new data formats can be a costly and difficult process. With Recode Weather, your way to BUFR/IWXXM can be much smoother and cost-effective.
Plain conversion of TAC messages to BUFR/IWXXM is not a sufficient solution because the converted data lacks important metadata. Recode Weather deals with this by enriching the produced BUFR/IWXXM messages with proper metadata in order to deliver added value.
For instance, SYNOP metadata are enriched with additional metadata – station coordinates, station name, elevation, height of all sensors above ground, type of sensors, and so on. TAC SYNOP (in FM-12 alphanumeric code) contains data with sufficient precision, but it does not carry any required metadata, so they are added by Recode Weather during the encoding in order to produce rich and valid BUFR synoptic observations.