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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:

Examining BUFR 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 emagram using the Thermo View.

Filtering

BUFR is an extremely flexible format and the typical way to handle it is use a filter on it. Metview comes with its own BUFR filter to extract BUFR data from BUFR messages in tabular format, as Geopoints or CSV, which can then be easily plotted and is are very well suited for data processing. The filter is implemented by the Observation Filter and the Bufr Picker icons, the latter one is being able to extract multiple values per message.

Retrieval from MARS

If Metview has access to ECMWF's MARS archive, BUFR data can be retrieved via the Mars Retrieval icon. At ECMWF MARS access is set up on all computer systems, while outside ECMWF the MARS Web API could be used in Metview (see the setup instructions here).

Script language support

Metview provides full support for GRIB BUFR from its Macro and Python interfaces.

In script GRIB data is represented as a fieldset, which is basically a list of GRIB messages. Fieldset handling is probably Metview's richest and most powerful interface. The full list of available functions and operators on fieldsets can be found on the Fieldset Functions and Thermodynamic Functions pages.