December 2021 software release

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

ecCodes

ecCodes, the heart of GRIB and BUFR handling, brings several features and bug fixes in version 2.24.0.

Note that the high-level Python interface (in eccodes/high_level/*) was always experimental and has been removed in this release.
Please use metview,  cfgrib and/or pdbufr instead.

Also note that ecCodes' Python 2 interface is no longer being developed. Users are strongly advised to migrate to Python 3.

Magics

Magics, ECMWF's plotting library, brings more improvements in version 4.10.0 including:

• The list of predefined geographical areas has been aligned with the list of geographical areas offered in the opencharts catalogue. To use them :

from Magics import macro as magics

area = magics.mmap(subpage_map_area_name=area_name, subpage_map_library_area='on') # where area_name specifies the predefined area to select.
magics.plot(area, magics.mcoast() ) 

• Improve positioning of axis labels in cartesian view

• Fix issues with multiple calls to the python plot method
• Improve symbol plotting with NetCDF data 

Metview

Metview 5.14.0 brings a mix of new features, fixes and improvements including:

• new annotations editor in the interactive plot window:
  • 
• support for dark theme in the user interface:
  • 
• with the latest support libraries (ecCodes, Magics, Mir), Metview now supports GRIB files encoded on a Lambert azimuthal grid on an oblate spheroid Earth, as produced by EFAS:
  
  • 
• many other new features, improvements and fixes
• see also the documentation on readthedocs

Metview's Python interface version 1.9.0 brings new features, including:

• the plot functions now automatically plot inline if running inside a Jupyter notebook
• inline plots in Jupyter notebooks will be automatically trimmed of surrounding whitespace if package 'pillow' is installed
• new high-level plotting functions to quickly generate graphical products
• new interface to work with datasets
• new functions to build popup dialogs and read in user input. Available via the newly added 'ui' module
• see Metview Python Release Notes for more information

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, the standalone interactive GRIB and BUFR examiner, brings new features in version 1.6.0  including:

• support for dark and light themes:

• added new tab called Tables in GRIB mode showing the path to the tables ecCodes used to decode the current message

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 visit support.ecmwf.int.