Blog from February, 2019

With the February 2019 synchronised release, for the first time we make the popular ECMWF software packages ecCodes and Magics available under the Windows operating system. Our partner Daniel Tipping from Old Reliable Tech made the necessary changes in both packages in order to compile under Windows and packaged them with the widely used pip and conda package managers of the Python community. This development allows users to decode and visualise BUFR and GRIB data on Windows using these tools.

Windows is not a platform that is used for technical work at ECMWF. Therefore we will not be able to support this platform as well as we do for others, such as Linux. If you find problems, we invite the Windows user community to use our new set-up on GitHub to fork/contribute and issue pull request changes to ecCodes and Magics. Old Reliable Tech has set up automatic tests and builds for Windows on GitHub, which should ensure continued releases for this new platform.

Please let us have your feedback on this work!

Snapshots showing Magics visualising GRIB fields decoded by ecCodes (right) and Magics showing NetCDF data (left). Both within Jupyter notebooks running under Windows.

This month's software release sees many major changes. This release should bring many improvements for Python users, with core packages, such as ecCodes and Magics now being accessible through pip and conda. This also includes now the Windows operating system. With version 4.0 of Magics the Python interface is now not part of the the core software package anymore. Users should use pip or conda to install the Python extensions.  This has the benefit of allowing support for using multiple Python versions at the same time. Magics also contains improvements for running with Jupyter notebooks. For examples see our Magics Jupyter notebook examples.

This is the first release in which Metview uses the new interpolation package MIR. We recommend users to test this version carefully before introducing this in production use. The previous interpolation through Emoslib is still possible. We welcome any feedback to this change. Metview 5.5 also features a new set of thermodynamic functions and lots of new functionality for the Geopoints format.

New features of Metview: compute and plot a parcel path in a thermodynamic diagram (left) & 
functions based on the horizontal derivatives of regular lat-lon fieldsets have been added (right)

Metview is built at ECMWF with all the versions of our libraries listed in the table below, and all are included in the February 2019 Metview Bundle. All these packages use the same build system based on CMake - simplifying and harmonising the installation experience. The versions are available on all ECMWF computer systems as "new" versions. If you encounter any issues please feel free to send feedback to Software.Support@ecmwf.int.