Regional ATOVS Retransmission Services (RARS)

Regional ATOVS Retransmission Services (RARS) Project

On these RARS Project web pages you can find the following information:

• RARS concept
• RARS motivation, background and benefits
• RARS overall approach
• Current implementation status
• RARS data quality monitoring
• RARS data coding summary
• How to access RARS data
• RARS contacts and links

Your views on these RARS web pages, especially suggestions on how they may be improved, are always welcomed. Please use the Space Programme contact us page to provide your feedback or to request more information.

RARS concept

Regional ATOVS Retransmission Services (RARS) are operational arrangements for the real-time acquisition of polar-orbiting satellite data over a wide region containing a network of direct readout stations and their rapid delivery to the global user community through regional Processing Centres.

A RARS involves several direct readout stations in a given region, each of which acquires local data from polar-orbiting satellites in real-time via the satellite's digital High Resolution Picture Transmission (HRPT) broadcast as the satellite passes within the range of the station. The data are then locally processed and passed to a regional Processing Centre that is responsible for overall coordination, for near-real time concentration of local data from the direct readout stations and for rapid delivery of consistent sets of data covering the region, for use throughout the region and worldwide. 

RARS system concept

Compared with the normal means of access to global data, this approach allows access by users to a regional sub-set of data without the delay associated with on-board data storage prior to a full orbit data dump to a Command and Data Acquisition station.

The WMO Space Programme has initiated this project to establish several RARS that, together, should cover most of the globe, with initial focus is on ATOVS data. It currently includes EARS (covering the European, Atlantic, North-American, Arctic and North-African areas), the Asia-Pacific RARS and the South-American RARS.

The way in which the global RARS network is built from individual regional RARS with well-defined links for inter-regional exchange is shown below.

RARS network concept

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