Blog from June, 2020

The June 2020 release of our software provides many new features, improvements and fixes!

ecCodes, the heart of GRIB and BUFR handling, brings performance improvements, support for the Mercator projection and several smaller features/bug fixes.
Please note that ecCodes' Python 2 interface is no longer being developed. Users are strongly advised to migrate to Python 3.

Magics, ECMWF's plotting library, and  Metview, ECMWF's interactive and batch software for manipulation and plotting of data, combine with the latest ecCodes to bring plotting support, including interactive Cursor Data for GRIBs encoded with various projections such as Mercator and Lambert variants:

Metview brings some more improvements, such as:

• much improved speed of plotting in-memory arrays of data using the Input Visualiser thanks to allowing vectors (Macro language) or numpy arrays (Python) to be used as data
• 
• the last two modules that were originally implemented in Fortran (Spectra and Potential Temperature) have been converted to C++, meaning they will be available to more users
• fixes for macOS
• new Gallery examples
• more - see the release notes!

CodesUI, ECMWF's standalone examiner for GRIB and BUFR data, adds a fix:

• fixed an issue where the BUFR filter could unexpectedly crash

Please note that when building from source, the minimum CMake version requirement is 3.6.

Metview is built at ECMWF with all the versions of our libraries listed in the table below, and all are included in the Metview Bundle. The versions are available on all ECMWF computer systems as "new" versions. Versions on conda have also been updated. If you encounter any issues please feel free to send feedback to Software.Support@ecmwf.int.

Dear GRIB API users,

The GRIB API software package has long been superseded by ecCodes, as
announced in 2017.

Our next step to fully decommissioning the software package is the removal of
the GRIB API documentation hosted in our Confluence site
(https://confluence.ecmwf.int/display/GRIB), which includes all source
releases of the software.

The removal will happen on the 30th June 2020. Users are invited to update
any links to point to the ecCodes documentation instead. The ecCodes
documentation link is: https://confluence.ecmwf.int/display/ECC

If you have any concerns, please contact Software Support as soon as possible.

Kind regards

ECMWF Software Support
software.support@ecmwf.int