March 2020 software release

The March 2020 release of our software provides many new features, improvements and fixes!

ecCodes, the heart of GRIB and BUFR handling, brings performance improvements, new parameters and several smaller bug fixes/improvements. Please note that ecCodes' Python 2 interface is no longer being developed. Users are strongly advised to migrate to Python 3.

Metview, ECMWF's interactive and batch software for manipulation and plotting of data, brings a number of new features and improvements, such as:

• easier access to the layer metadata in the interactive plot window
• a new set of pre-defined areas in the Geographical View icon
• improvements to the GRIB and BUFR examiners (and hence also in CodesUI)
• improvements to the existing thermodynamic functions
• plus a new function to compute relative humidity from temperature and dewpoint, a new way to control the font sizes in the user interface
• many more, including some bug fixes
• Metview's Python interface also contains some improvements in ease-of-use and some fixes
  
  • please try the Binder link from github!
  • note that version 1.4.0 of the Python bindings require at least Metview 5.8.1

Metview now offers a more streamlined way to view the layer metadata in a plot, plus a large selection of pre-defined areas

Magics, ECMWF's plotting library, adds some smaller improvements:

• new version of PROJ to handle projections (was using PROJ4): Please report any issues.
• improved plotting of ORCA grids (netCDF)
  
• improved layout of the automatic legend : Adding margin option parameters 
• added format option of the grib_info key dataDate <grib_info key='dataDate' format='%d/%m%Y'/>

CodesUI, the standalone combination of Metview's GRIB and BUFR examiners, provides a highly improved initial BUFR message scan (about 50-100 times faster than before), a filter bar for the GRIB namespace list and extra information about BUFR elements.

Please note that when building from source, the minimum CMake version requirement is 3.6.

Metview is built at ECMWF with all the versions of our libraries listed in the table below, and all are included in the March 2020 Metview Bundle. 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.