DRAFT - December 2018 software release

We are happy to announce the December versions of the standard ECMWF software packages. This month's release featured mostly incremental updates to our packages.  While much testing has been done and much care been taken, there might be still some impact on the contouring. Please let us know if you might see any regressions. ecCodes saw many smaller improvements, especially for the performance of BUFR handling. Metview offers new automatic styles based on the ecCharts web map service.

Metview now offers the ecCharts styles (left), which are previewed in the icon editor (right).

Python 3 interface for ecCodes

With ecCodes 2.10, we prepared a beta version of the long awaited Python 3 interface to the ecCodes API. While the migration to Python 3 of many other packages has been done, ecCodes had proved more challenging. The main challenge has been that the underlying file I/O has radically changed with Python 3, therefore we needed to rewrite some of the underlying code. This required careful testing to ensure no regression in functionality (including the Python 2 installations). We try to minimise the impact to users and their programs, but some minor changes required by Python 3 itself are required. When opening any BUFR or GRIB files please ensure this happens in binary mode, like this:

f = open("myfields.grib","rb")

This change in your programs will also work in Python 2. We would like to thank everyone who expressed an interest, and will make sure that you will be informed as soon as we can provide a Python 3 version. Thank you for your patience. Anyone interested in a higher level Python 3 interface to read GRIB data into xarray, should have a look at cfgrib.

All these packages use the same build system based on CMake - simplifying and harmonising the installation experience. The versions are available on all ECMWF computer systems as "new" versions. If you encounter any issues please feel free to send feedback to Software.Support@ecmwf.int.