AEC is an implementation of CCSDS compression using libaec.

CCSDS stands for Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems and is a WMO standard for lossless data compression (Data representation template 5.42)

Note: This is only available in GRIB edition 2

To encode with this packing type:

% grib_set -w isGridded=1 -r -s packingType=grid_ccsds in.grib2 out.grib2

This makes sure only those fields which are gridded (not spectral) are affected.

This is relatively fast with a good compression ratio.

When building ecCodes, make sure you install libaec and enable this option via the cmake option -DENABLE_AEC=ON.

In the same way, it is also possible to change encoding from CCSDS to grid_simple with the following command:

% grib_set -w packingType=grid_ccsds -r -s packingType=grid_simple in.grib2 out.grib2