March 2021 software release

The March 2021 release of our software provides many new features, improvements and fixes!

ecCodes

ecCodes, the heart of GRIB and BUFR handling, brings new tool features, new CAMS/CARRA/CERRA parameters, support for CEMS Fire products, contributions from users and several smaller features/bug fixes in version 2.21.0.
Please note that ecCodes' Python 2 interface is no longer being developed. Users are strongly advised to migrate to Python 3.
Also the pip package name has changed to 'eccodes'. Please use this command to install the ecCodes Python bindings:

pip install eccodes

Magics

Magics, ECMWF's plotting library, brings more improvements in version 4.6.0 including :

• Support has been added for NetCDF data coded with int64
• Improved automatic styling and scaling
• and few bug fixes for metview.

Metview

Metview 5.11.0 brings a number of fixes for performance and stability, including:

• output plots in animated gif format from the plot window
• performance improvements in geopoints operations
• new function absolute_vorticity() to compute absolute vorticity from relative vorticity GRIB data
• 16 new Gallery examples
• on ECMWF workstations, this version comes bundled with a pre-release version of a new data exploration app called MetZoom!
  • this is not yet available on ecgate, or outside ECMWF
• more - see the release notes!

Metview's Python interface version 1.7.0 brings new features, including:

• new Jupyter widget for animating plots
• Fieldset.to_dataset() allows cfgrib controlling arguments to be passed

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

CodesUI

CodesUI, ECMWF's standalone examiner for GRIB and BUFR data, adds:

• for BUFR data, now allows subset navigation from subset value list in info sidebar
• for BUFR data, the flag table value bits are now shown correctly in the details sidebar

The software versions of this release are available on all ECMWF computer systems as "new" versions. Versions on conda should be available in the coming days. If you encounter any issues please feel free to send feedback to Software.Support@ecmwf.int.