Metview


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

History

Developments were started at ECMWF in 1990 in co-operation with the National Institute for Space Research of Brazil and Météo-France.
YearVersionChanges
1990AnnouncementAnnouncement at EGOWS
1991First prototypeBatch system at National Institute for Space Research
19931.0First batch and user interface
19982.0Use of OpenGL for interactive visualisation
20003.0New user interface
20104.0Upgrade to Magics++ graphics library; released as Open-source software under Apache License
20144.5New user interface based on Qt version 4
20185.0Switch to Qt version 5, improved plot window and new Python interface

Features

User interface

Metview has an icon based user interface, where any aspect of a meteorological 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.

  1. Metview Macro
  2. reading GRIB files through the read function
a = read
b = read
  1. calculating the differences between two fields
c = a-b
  1. plotting the result
plot

In 2017 a Python version of the macro language was developed.

Supported file formats

Metview supports the various meteorological data formats as input and output formats: GRIB, BUFR, NetCDF, ODB, Local databases and ASCII data files

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 client and uses for GRIB and BUFR handling and 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, in Ubuntu and MacPorts. RPMs for major Linux distribution are provided on the Open Build Service.