New data available on the Aloft data portal

VPTS data were added for radars in Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Lithuania, Malta, and Romania.

• Peter Desmet

EUMETNET has recently updated the list of OPERA member countries that grant access to single site radar data and data products. Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Romania, and Serbia have joined the agreement. Israel has left.

As with all countries in the agreement, PVOL data (if available) are processed by BALTRAD to VPTS data. Those VPTS data are subsequently synchronized to the Aloft data portal. See Desmet et al. (2025) for more information on the process. Note that the presence and quality of biological signals has not been evaluated. Data became available on 2025-12-09 for most of the new countries.

Additional countries

You can explore the new data in CROW. We also enabled access to new radars from existing countries (dksam, ptflr, ptsmg, sevax) (aloftdata/crow#21).

Country Radars with data
Cyprus no data yet
Greece grand
Hungary hubud, huhar, hunap, hupog, husze
Iceland isbjo, iskef, isska
Ireland iesha
Latvia no data yet
Lithuania ltlau, ltvil
Malta no data yet
Romania robar, robob, robuc, rocra, romed, roora, rotim
Serbia no data yet

Radar metadata update

As part of this update, we synchronized radar metadata from the source files maintained by OPERA (aloftdata/aloftdata.eu#22). Five radar stations have changed codes:

Location Previous code Current code Year(s) of change
Puntijarka hrzag hrpun 2021/2024
Sierra de Fuentes (Caceres) esbad essft 2023/2025
Corbera (Barcelona) esbar esgld 2023/2025
Torrejon de Velasco (Madrid) esmad estjv 2023/2025
Alhaurin el Grande (Malaga) esmal esahr 2023/2025

See Table 2 in Desmet et al. (2025) for previous code changes.

Data access

Use the getRad R package to access the new data and metadata. As always, beware of the caveats.

library(getRad)
library(dplyr, warn.conflicts = FALSE)

# Get VPTS data
get_vpts(radar = "robar", datetime = "2026-02-01", source = "baltrad")
#>                    Irregular time series of vertical profiles (class vpts)
#> 
#>            radar:  robar 
#>       # profiles:  263 
#> time range (UTC):  2026-02-01 00:00:00 - 2026-02-01 21:45:00 
#>    time step (s):  min: 0     max:  900

# Get radar metadata
wr <- get_weather_radars()
wr |> filter(country == "Romania") |> select(radar, location)
#> # A tibble: 8 × 3
#>   radar location             geometry
#>   <chr> <chr>             <POINT [°]>
#> 1 robar Barnova   (27.58255 47.01184)
#> 2 romed Medgidia  (28.25059 44.24336)
#> 3 robob Bobohalma (24.22523 46.36022)
#> 4 rotim Timisoara (21.25773 45.77174)
#> 5 roora Oradea    (21.94289 47.09218)
#> 6 robuc Bucuresti (26.07735 44.51267)
#> 7 rocra Craiova   (23.86743 44.31029)
#> 8 roopa Oradea          (21.94 47.09)