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What is BUFR?

BUFR (Binary Universal Form for Representation of meteorological data) is a binary data format maintained by WMO. The Metview BUFR interface is based on ecCodes and can handle both BUFR  edition 3 and edition 4 seamlessly.

The BUFR icon?

BUFR files are represented by this icon in the user interface:

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Examining GRIB contents

The contents of a BUFR file can be inspected with the BUFR Examiner, which can be started up from the user interface (right-click examine on the icon).

Visualisation on maps

Some conventional BUFR observations types (such as SYNOP and TEMP) can be directly visualised in Metview on a map view. In the user interface just right-click visualise on the icon to get a plot with the default settings. These plots  can be further customised with the Observation Plotting icon.

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Visualisation on thermodynamic diagrams

The Thermo Data icon can extract thermodynamic profiles from BUFR which can then be visualised in a tephigram, skew-t or emagarm using the Thermo View.

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Filtering

Otherwise the general technique to visualise BUFR data is to extract a subset as Geopoints or CSV and then visualise the resulting scattered point data (see below).