Metview
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Metview is a meteorological workstation and batch system developed at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).[1]
| Metview | |
|---|---|
Logo of Metview | |
| Developer | European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) |
| Initial release | 1991 |
| Stable release | 5.23.0
/ 2 October 2024 |
| Written in | C++ (Qt), C, Python |
| Operating system | Linux, macOS |
| Available in | British English |
| Type | Scientific visualization |
| License | Apache |
| Website | metview |
History
Development began at ECMWF in 1990 in co-operation with the National Institute for Space Research of Brazil and Météo-France.[2]
| Year | Version | Changes |
|---|---|---|
| 1990 | Announcement | Announcement at EGOWS[3] |
| 1991 | First prototype | Batch system at National Institute for Space Research |
| 1993 | 1.0 | First batch and user interface |
| 1998 | 2.0 | Use of OpenGL for interactive visualisation |
| 2000 | 3.0 | New user interface (Motif) |
| 2010 | 4.0 | Upgrade to Magics++ graphics library;[4] released as Open-source software under Apache License[5] |
| 2014 | 4.5 | New user interface based on Qt version 4 |
| 2018 | 5.0 | Switch to Qt version 5, improved plot window and new Python interface |
Features
User interface
Metview has an icon based graphical user interface, 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), Binary Universal Form for the Representation of meteorological data (BUFR), Network Common Data Form (NetCDF), and OpenDocument Database Front End Document Format (ODB).
Macro language for batch processing
The Macro language is designed as a high-level programming language 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 was developed.[6]
File format support
Metview supports the various meteorological data formats as input and output formats: GRIB (editions 1 and 2), BUFR,[7] NetCDF, ODB (ECMWF Observation Database),[8] Local databases and ASCII data files (comma-separated values, grids and scattered data)
Development
All major developments are made at the Development Section at ECMWF. Most of the code is in C++ and the code is versioned in git. CMake is used as build system.
Metview makes use of other software packages developed at ECMWF. Metview is an extended MARS client,[9] and uses ecCodes[10] for GRIB and BUFR handling and Magics[11] for contouring and visualisation.
Distribution
Metview is distributed mainly as a source code tar file, termed a tarball, under an Apache License version 2.0. There are plans to distribute the code on GitHub.
Binary versions of Metview are available in conda (through the conda-forge channel), in Ubuntu[12] and MacPorts.[13] RPMs for major Linux distribution are provided on the Open Build Service.[14]