ROLSS : the RMIB On Line Short-term Service

This page provides the minimal information needed to access the near real time data from the GERB instruments.

Generalities

The ROLSS provides near real-time Level 2.0 (radiances and fluxes) data from the GERB instruments. This FTP site aims to provide data to the user community within less than 4 hours. The data are automatically removed from the site after 40 days. The long term archive of the Edition ARG products is hosted on the GGSPS at RAL and at the British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC).

The full archive of all GERB level 2 data (all instruments and all formats) is also available on the ROLSS, in the directory “Archive”.

Data access

The use of the data is subject to a careful reading of the GERB Data Policy, the GERB Edition-1 Quality Summary, and the GERB Edition-1 Release Paper. To access to the near real-time data using FTP, follow these steps:

Register to the ROLSS mailing list.

Keep the username (email address in lower case) and password submitted.

Wait for the confirmation email of the list.

Access the data through FTP on “gerb.oma.be” using your username and password.

ROLSS Announcement Mailing List

This mailing list is used to broadcast announcements concerning the ROLSS products and their distribution (such as new product versions, server downtimes) to the registered users. The archives of this list are available here.

Currently available NRT data

At this time, the site proposes data from the GERB-3 instrument on Meteosat-10 (also known as MSG-3). These data are unvalidated and should not be used for quantitative scientific studies. The access to these pre-release data is normally restricted to the GERB science team members.

Currently available "archive" data

In the directory “Archive” you will find the full data record of GERB level 2. The data are provided in subdirectories

Archive/G2/SEV1 (from 1st Feb. 2004 to 30 Apr. 2007)
Archive/G1/SEV2 (from 1st May 2007 to 19 Feb. 2013)

of the ROLSS FTP site gerb.oma.be.

We strongly recommend using a FTP command-like client.

The GERB data are available under different space/time formats: ARG, BARG, EUROPE, ARCH (defined here). To know which geolocation file you need to use for a data file, look into the HDF file you want to use for an attribute under HDF path “/Geolocation/Geolocation File Name”. It is a string that refers to the name of the geolocation file to use. The data is stored in the following subdirectories:

G1_SEV2_L20_ARG_SOL Shortwave GERB-res/15' (ARG)
G1_SEV2_L20_ARG_TH Longwave GERB-res/15' (ARG)
G1_SEV2_L20_ARG_GEO Geolocation GERB-res/15' (ARG)

G1_SEV2_L20_BARG_SOL_M15_R50 Shortwave GERB-res/15' (BARG)
G1_SEV2_L20_BARG_TH_M15_R50 Longwave GERB-res/15' (BARG)
G1_SEV2_L20_BARG_SGEO_M15_R50 Geolocation GERB-res/15' (BARG)

G1_SEV2_L20A_HR_SOL_TH Archive High-Resolution (SHI full disk)
G1_SEV2_L20_HR_GEO Geolocation High-Resolution (SHI full disk)
G1_SEV2_L20_HR_STATION Stations High-Resolution (SHI stations)

G1_SEV2_L20_HR_SOL_EUROPE Shortwave High-res Europe (SHI Europe)
G1_SEV2_L20_HR_TH_EUROPE Longwave High-res Europe (SHI Europe)
G1_SEV2_L20_HR_GEO_EUROPE Geolocation High-res Europe (SHI Europe)

For GERB2, just change G1_SEV2 into G2_SEV1.

For GERB3, the prefix should be G3_SEV3 as this instrument is processed using SEVIRI data from MSG3 (thus SEV3). Note that currently we do not provide any GERB3 data (still in calibration/validation stage).

Related documentation

GERB data format web page

MSG-RMIB-GE-UG : L2 RMIB products user guide ftp://gerb.oma.be/Documents/userguide.pdf

Data format: web pages for HDF5

For more information contact the GERB team at gerb@meteo.be