August 2022 software release

The August 2022 release of our software provides many new features, improvements and fixes! Note that the packages below are part of a much larger software stack used at ECMWF, and this is part of a release that is synchronised between all these packages.

ecCodes

ecCodes, the heart of GRIB and BUFR handling, brings several new features, improvements and fixes in version 2.27.0:

• performance improvements for nearest neighbour and CCSDS decoding
• full CEMS fire GRIB support for MARS
• experimental C++ compilation
• miscellaneous bug fixes
• see ecCodes Release Notes for full details

Also note that the CMake option ENABLE_AEC is now ON by default. AEC (Adaptive Entropy Coding) provides the WMO GRIB CCSDS compression and decompression of data.
To force the build without it, use -DENABLE_AEC=OFF

Metview

Metview 5.17.0 brings a mix of new features, fixes and improvements including:

• new functions static_stability() and q_vector()
• new function pl_to_pl() to interpolate a fieldset from one set of pressure levels to another
• the thermodynamic parcel computations have been revised and several new option were added; other improvements in Thermo BUFR module
• improvements in Hovmoeller module
• Metview's Contouring icon (mcont() function) now takes advantage of a feature from a recent release of Magics, allowing the built-in set of colour palettes to be used with arbitrary numbers of increments
• improved colour editor in user interface
• new Gallery examples
• and more - see the release notes!

Metview's Python interface version 1.13.0 brings new features, including:

• added new functions smooth_n_point() and smooth_gaussian() to perform spatial smoothing on fieldsets with lat-lon grids
• added new function convolve() to perform spatial 2D convolution on fieldsets with lat-lon grids
• fieldset functions mean() and sum() now accept 'dim' argument to compute over given dimension
• 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 The Metview Source Bundle.

The Q Vector used in quasi-geostrophic (QG) theory is now available as function q_vector()

Metview's improved colour editor is available from any icon editor that contains a colour parameter

The software versions of this release are available on all ECMWF computer systems as "new" versions. On our Bologna HPC, they are installed into a single module called ecmwf-toolbox. Versions on conda should be available in the coming days. If you encounter any issues please feel free to use the ECMWF Support Portal.