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ecCodes provides high-level access to the information in a GRIB message through a set of edition-independent keys. The advantage in writing code using only those keys is that the resulting application is edition-independent and can therefore process GRIB edition 1 or 2 transparently.
Some of the edition-independent keys are grouped in namespaces for convenience (think of a namespace as a fancy word for a grouping of related keys).
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All the values of the keys belonging to a namespace can be printed with the -n option of grib_ls or with the keys iterator provided by the library.
The corresponding namespaces of two GRIB messages can be compared with grib_compare which is able to detect the keys of the enquired namespace having different values in the two messages.
The following namespaces are available:
Namespace | Contents |
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ls | This is the namespace used by the grib_ls and bufr_ls tools and has the most commonly used keys e.g. centre, shortName, level, etc |
parameter | Contains keys like paramId, shortName, units which relate to the meteorological parameter |
statistics | Contains keys that relate to the statistics of the data values e.g. maximum, minimum, average, standard deviation, etc |
time | Contains keys that describe the forecast runs e.g. forecast date, validity date, steps, etc |
geography | Contains keys that describe the grid geometry e.g. bounding box of the grid, number of points along with a parallel, etc |
vertical | Contains keys that describe the levels and layers e.g. type of the level, list of coefficients of the vertical coordinate, etc |
mars | Contains the list of MARS (ECMWF's Meteorological Archive and Retrieval System) keywords like class, stream, type, etc |
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