How do I swap (reverse) the scanning order? for example changing north-to-south to south-to-north

Step-by-step guide

Say you have a GRIB file with scanning order of south-to-north (for latitudes). This means the key "jScansPositively" is 1. You want to change this to north-to-south i.e. jScansPositively should become 0

  1. Ensure that the grid geometry of your GRIB message specifies both the latitudes: 

    latitudeOfFirstGridPointInDegrees and latitudeOfLastGridPointInDegrees

  2. Check what scanning modes you have in your input file:

    % grib_ls -p jScansPositively,iScansPositively input.grib

  3. Use the grib_set command to swap the scanning order for the latitudes:

    % grib_set -s swapScanningY=1  input.grib  output.grib

    This changes the order in which the data is stored in the GRIB message

There is also the key "swapScanningX" to do the same task for longitudes (east-to-west changed to west-to-east).

Here is a way of visualising the different scanning orders:



The swapScanningX/Y keys only work for regular lat/lon grids and regular Gaussian grids. It is not to be used for reduced grids, Lambert, Polar stereographic, Mercator etc
Check the output GRIB file to ensure the data is shown correctly e.g., by plotting it