Norman

As far as I knew SYNOP hasn't existed for quite a while, internally the Met Office were using BUFR and then converting it to SYNOP for other countries that hadn't made the switch. It's a great shame though because SYNOPs were easy to read and the format is nice and compact. One of the reasons (at one time of day) for changing to BUFR was that it could be compressed but with memory (RAM and hard disks) being so cheap and comms being so fast that's not such a great reason to "encrypt" observational data and squirrel it away on data servers where it will never be seen again - at least not by the general public.

I will certainly miss them in if this does happen and FSU does close its doors. In around about 4 seconds I can download just under a megabyte of SYNOPs and have the whole world plotted - over 6,500 land and sea observations.

The same is true for TEMP messages...

It had to happen eventually I suppose, but it's just another avenue being closed off to what after all should be freely available data. But on the bright side we can always rely on the WOW site to provide us with good quality observational data that we can all trust!

Bruce.