Metview is a

meteorological Meteorology is a branch of the atmospheric sciences (which include atmospheric chemistry and physics) with a major focus on weather forecasting. The study of meteorology dates back millennia, though significant progress in meteorology did not ...

workstation 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; an ...

History

Developments were started 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 Park, Reading, United Kingdom; Bologna, Italy; an ...

in 1990 in co-operation with the

National Institute for Space Research The National Institute for Space Research ( pt, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais, INPE) is a research unit of the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovations, the main goals of which are fostering scientific research an ...

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

and

Météo-France Météo-France is the France, French national Meteorology, meteorological service. Organisation The organisation was established by decree in June 1993 and is a department of the Ministry of Transportation. It is headquartered in Paris but man ...

Features

User interface

Metview has an icon based user interface, where any aspect of a meteorological (graphical) product is expressed in an icon. Users can prototype 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

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 C ...

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 o ...

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 Unidata ...

and ODB.

Metview Macro language for batch processing

The Macro language is designed to be high level to allow analysts and scientist to concentrate on the work/processing flow they try to achieve. # 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.

Supported file formats

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 A comma-separated values (CSV) file is a delimited text file that uses a comma to separate values. Each line of the file is a data record. Each record consists of one or more fields, separated by commas. The use of the comma as a field separat ...

, grids and scattered data)

Development

All major developments are made at the Development Section at

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

git Git () is a distributed version control system: tracking changes in any set of files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. Its goals include speed, data integ ...

CMake In software development, CMake is cross-platform free and open-source software for build automation, testing, packaging and installation of software by using a compiler-independent method. CMake is not a build system itself; it generates ano ...

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

Distribution

Metview is mainly distributed as a source tarball under the Apache License version 2.0. There are plans to distribute the code on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, co ...

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

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

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', '' Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All th ...

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's similar in function to Fink and the BSD ports collections ...

RPM Revolutions per minute (abbreviated rpm, RPM, rev/min, r/min, or with the notation min−1) is a unit of rotational speed or rotational frequency for rotating machines. Standards ISO 80000-3:2019 defines a unit of rotation as the dimension ...

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

References

External links

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