SoDa Monitoring

Historic: Since the very beginning of the SoDa project in 2003, the MSG images have been acquired at MINES ParisTech. Since February 2010, we duplicate the chain of acquisition of the images and the routines to update the HelioClim3 at the location of the Company Transvalor, Mougins (France). This duplication offers the advantage to increase the reliability of acquisition of the images by compensating the failures of one site by the other. Until the end of the year 2010, the two chains were operating separately, and we manually performed the synchronisation of the data. But since January 2011, both sites (MINES and TSV) are fully synchronous.

Principle of image acquisition and monitoring: every 15 minute, 2 MSG slots (or images: VIS 600 nm and 800 nm) are normally collected. As soon as the images of the data are acquired, the HelioSat-2 method is run to update the HelioClim3 database. Here are the potential scenarios of problems:

• Slots not acquired (MS = Missing Slot): The reasons are an electrical failure, a problem on the satellite or at Eumetsat during the slot transfer... In this case, Eumetsat emits a warning issue, and the images can not be retrieved by any mean. The consequence is the the slots are missing. (in the table: MS = Missing Slots)
• Slots acquired but the database is not updated (NU = Not Updated): The images have been judged as corrupted by our image quality routines. One of the reason can be missing values inside the images themselves. Another source of error can be an error in the reception at the dish level. (in the table: NU = Not Updated)

=> See the missing slots of the HelioClim3 database since May 2010.