March 2022 software release

The March 2022 release of our software provides many new features, improvements and fixes!

ecCodes

ecCodes, the heart of GRIB and BUFR handling, brings new GRIB ocean parameters, contributions from users and several features/bug fixes in version 2.25.0.

Note that the CMake option ENABLE_AEC is now ON by default. AEC (Adaptive Entropy Coding) provides the WMO GRIB CCSDS compression and decompression of data.
To force the build without it, use -DENABLE_AEC=OFF

Also note that ecCodes' Python 2 interface is no longer being developed. Users are strongly advised to migrate to Python 3.

Magics

Magics, ECMWF's plotting library, brings more improvements in version 4.11.0 including:

User defined coastlines: Magics has the possibility for users to use their own set of shapefiles as coastlines. In this version, we added a parameter map_user_layer_land_colour(Default:NONE). If given a colour , the user coastlines will be filled.

• Observations plotting using template(Small issues fixed): Magics allows users to define a XML template to display observations-like information.
  The template describes how to position the information.  Users is able to pass a json object as observation, and Magics will use the template to position the different items of the observation.

LineString in GeoJSon: Magics is now supporting the feature Linestring from the GeoJSON format.

• Fortran interface : A bug fix when calling popen/pclose several times. 

• A Jupyter notebook is available to describe the change

Metview

Metview 5.15.0 brings a mix of new features, fixes and improvements including:

• added the ability to save  Weather Symbol Objects as icons on the desktop and also to a user library for easy access
• new interpolation methods available in the Regrid module aimed at using Geopoints as input
• many other new features, improvements and fixes
• big update to the documentation on readthedocs including tutorials, user guides and release notes! From this release onwards, the documentation on readthedocs will be updated and that on Confluence will not

Metview's Weather Symbols can now be saved in different ways for repeated use

Metview's documentation is now updated only on readthedocs

Metview's Python interface version 1.11.0 brings new features, including:

• improvements in how selecting and sorting Fieldsets work
• see Metview Python Release Notes for more information

Metview is built at ECMWF with all the versions of our libraries listed in the table below, and all are included in the The Metview Source Bundle.

CodesUI

 CodesUI, the standalone interactive GRIB and BUFR examiner, brings new features in version 1.7.0  including:

• GRIB Examiner now displays both the native value and the string value in the namespace dumps

• improved searching in the BUFR Examiner

• other fixes

• these improvements exist both in CodesUI and Metview's GRIB and BUFR examiners

codesUI now displays native as well as string representations of keys

The software versions of this release are available on all ECMWF computer systems as "new" versions. Versions on conda should be available in the coming days. If you encounter any issues please feel free to use the ECMWF Support Portal.