Page History

At inception around 2010, the extratropical extra-tropical cyclone diagrams (= "cyclone database" products) were generated using bitmap manipulation. As a result the products had a somewhat noisy/jagged visual appearance relative to many NWP products available nowadays (2021). In addition the software was proving costly to maintain. So in May 2021, and in close collaboration with the UK Met Office, ECMWF upgraded to a Python-based code suite, which applies the same graphical processing principles, but which saves the frontal objects in vector form and recreates fronts from those vectors wherever they are needed on a product. For these products this provides an aesthetically pleasing visual appearance, clearer rendering of details and a capacity to use transparency settings. In future this software change will also facilitate greater platform portability (e.g. for ecCharts, commensurate with user requests) and easier development of other product variants. During the upgrade a few other minor changes were applied, including correction of a pre-existing bug that affected the strike probability products. The main differences in output that resulted from these various changes are highlighted below, for user reference:

...