Metview

Metview is a meteorological workstation and batch system developed at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.[1]

Metview
Logo of Metview
Developer(s)ECMWF
Initial release1991 (1991)
Stable release
5.10.1 / 9 November 2020 (2020-11-09)
Written inC++, C, Python and Qt
Operating systemLinux, OS X
Available inBritish English
TypeScientific visualization
LicenseApache License
Websitesoftware.ecmwf.int/metview

History

Developments were started at ECMWF in 1990 in co-operation with the National Institute for Space Research of Brazil and Météo-France.[2]

Time line of Metview major versions and changes
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
This screenshot of the Metview desktop shows its icon based interface and its visualisation capabilities.

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, BUFR, NetCDF 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 was developed.[6]

Supported file formats

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. In fact Metview is an extended MARS client and uses ecCodes for GRIB and BUFR handling and 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.

Binary versions of Metview are available in conda (through the conda-forge channel), in Ubuntu[9] and MacPorts.[10] RPMs for major Linux distribution are provided on the Open Build Service.[11]

References
  1. "Metview Official Website". ECMWF. Retrieved 2 December 2017.
  2. Russell, Iain (January 2014). "News item in ECMWF Newsletter 138 (Winter 2013/2014): Metview's 20th Anniversary" (PDF). ECMWF.
  3. Daabeck, Jens (June 1990). "Report from the EGOWS meeting" (PDF). EGOWS report. 1. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-05. Retrieved 2017-12-03.
  4. Siemen, Stephan (2 December 2017). "2B.2 Metview 4 & Magics++ answering new challenges of increasing volumes of data (2010 - 90annual_26iips)". ams.confex.com. Retrieved 2017-12-03.
  5. Siemen, Stephan. "Abstract: Metview: Helping to make best use of ECMWF's data (93rd American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting)". ams.confex.com. Retrieved 2017-12-03.
  6. Russell, Iain (January 2020). "Metview's Python interface opens new possibilities". ECMWF Newsletter. 162: 36–39.
  7. Karhila, Vesa (July 2012). "BUFR data and Metview" (PDF). ECMWF Newsletter. 132: 34–36.
  8. Kertesz, Sandor (January 2012). "A new framework to handle ODB in Metview 4" (PDF). ECMWF Newsletter. 130: 31–33.
  9. "metview package : Ubuntu". launchpad.net. Retrieved 2017-12-02.
  10. macports-ports: The MacPorts ports tree, MacPorts, 2017-12-01, retrieved 2017-12-02
  11. "Show home:SStepke / Metview - openSUSE Build Service". build.opensuse.org. Retrieved 2017-12-02.
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