Metview is a

meteorological Meteorology is the scientific study of the Earth's atmosphere and short-term atmospheric phenomena (i.e. weather), with a focus on weather forecasting. It has applications in the military, aviation, energy production, transport, agriculture ...

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating syste ...

and batch system developed at the

European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is an independent intergovernmental organisation supported by most of the nations of Europe. It is based at three sites: Shinfield Park, Reading, United Kingdom; Bologna, Italy; a ...

(ECMWF).

History

Development began at ECMWF in 1990 in co-operation with the

National Institute for Space Research The National Institute for Space Research (, INPE) is a research unit of the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (Brazil), Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovations, the main goals of which are fostering scientific r ...

Brazil Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, fifth-largest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population ...

and

Météo-France Météo-France is the official French meteorological administration, also offering services to Andorra and Monaco. It has the powers of the state and can exercise them in relation to meteorology. Météo-France is in charge of observing, study ...

Features

User interface

Metview has an icon based

graphical user interface A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...

, where any aspect of a meteorological (graphical) product is expressed in an icon. Users can prototype a visualisation by dragging and dropping icons in the plot area. Metview offers also various tools to explore and display the content of meteorological file formats, such as ''GRIdded Binary'' or ''General Regularly-distributed Information in Binary'' form (

GRIB GRIB (GRIdded Binary or General Regularly-distributed Information in Binary form) is a concise data format commonly used in meteorology to store historical and forecast weather data. It is standardized by the World Meteorological Organization's ...

), ''Binary Universal Form for the Representation'' of meteorological data (

BUFR The Binary Universal Form for the Representation of meteorological data (BUFR) is a binary data format maintained by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The latest version is BUFR Edition 4. BUFR Edition 3 is also considered current for op ...

), ''Network Common Data Form'' (

NetCDF NetCDF (Network Common Data Form) is a set of software libraries and self-describing, machine-independent data formats that support the creation, access, and sharing of array-oriented scientific data. The project homepage is hosted by the Unidat ...

), and '' OpenDocument Database Front End Document Format'' (ODB).

Macro language for batch processing

The Macro language is designed as a

high-level programming language A high-level programming language is a programming language with strong Abstraction (computer science), abstraction from the details of the computer. In contrast to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language ''elements'', be ea ...

to allow analysts and scientists to concentrate on the work and processing flow being developed. # Metview Macro # reading GRIB files through the read() function a = read(mygrib1.grb) b = read(mygrib2.grb) # calculating the differences between two fields c = a-b # plotting the result plot(c) In 2017 a Python version of the

macro language In computer programming, a macro (short for "macro instruction"; ) is a rule or pattern that specifies how a certain input should be mapped to a replacement output. Applying a macro to an input is known as macro expansion. The input and output ...

was developed.

File format support

Metview supports the various meteorological data formats as input and output formats:

(editions 1 and 2),

, ODB (ECMWF Observation Database), Local databases and ASCII data files (

comma-separated values Comma-separated values (CSV) is a text file format that uses commas to separate values, and newlines to separate records. A CSV file stores Table (information), tabular data (numbers and text) in plain text, where each line of the file typically r ...

, grids and scattered data)

Development

All major developments are made at the Development Section at

ECMWF The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is an independent intergovernmental organisation supported by most of the nations of Europe. It is based at three sites: Shinfield, Shinfield Park, Reading, Berkshire, Reading, Unite ...

. Most of the code is in C++ and the code is versioned in

git Git () is a distributed version control system that tracks versions of files. It is often used to control source code by programmers who are developing software collaboratively. Design goals of Git include speed, data integrity, and suppor ...

. CMake is used as build system. Metview makes use of other software packages developed at ECMWF. Metview is an extended MARS client, and uses ecCodes for GRIB and BUFR handling and Magics for contouring and visualisation.

Distribution

Metview is distributed mainly as a

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

tar file, termed a ''tarball'', under an

Apache License The Apache License is a permissive free software license written by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). It allows users to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software ...

version 2.0. There are plans to distribute the code on

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

Binary Binary may refer to: Science and technology Mathematics * Binary number, a representation of numbers using only two values (0 and 1) for each digit * Binary function, a function that takes two arguments * Binary operation, a mathematical op ...

versions of Metview are available in conda (through the conda-forge channel), in

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed primarily of free and open-source software. Developed by the British company Canonical (company), Canonical and a community of contributors under a Meritocracy, meritocratic gover ...

and

MacPorts MacPorts, formerly DarwinPorts, is a package manager for macOS and Darwin. It is an open-source software project that aims to simplify the installation of other open source software. It is similar in function to Fink and the BSD ports collection ...

. RPMs for major Linux distribution are provided on the Open Build Service.

References

External links

* {{Official website, confluence.ecmwf.int/metview Graphic software in meteorology Science software