The ECMWF GRIB API is an application program interface accessible from C and FORTRAN programs developed for encoding and decoding WMO FM-92 GRIB edition 1 and edition 2 messages. A useful set of command line tools is also provided to give quick access to grib messages.

New

License

This software is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License which incorporates the terms and conditions of version 3 of the GNU General Public License.

Description

The main requirement of this software is to decode different types of messages (GRIB 1 & 2) and to provide the same interface to access and modify them. As a consequence its design is very different from the old GRIBEX. Moreover the difference between the two message types is on a structural and semantic level and it is impossible and meaningless to address the information contained into a GRIB 1 or 2 message through a numeric table. These are the main reasons for which GRIB API has a key/value based approach and it is not compatible with GRIBEX. In the new GRIB API design each element of a grib message has an alphanumeric name (key) that can be used to access the information linked to it (value).

According to this approach the information contained into a message is entirely described by a set of keys and their values so that using few get and set functions it's possible to access and modify any value in the message regardless of its edition or even of its type. The structure and semantic of the message is into the keys rather than in the programming code. A description of how to use the set and get functions and how to find the available keys for a given message can be found in the GRIB API manual.

A set of command line tools have been developed using the GRIB API and is provided into the distribution. The aim of these tools is to easily perform some of the most common operations from a command line or in batch. It is easy indeed to inspect the content of a grib file or to copy some selected grib messages from a file or to modify the value of some keys using the tools that are described with some examples in the GRIB tools documentation.

GRIB API and GRIB tools are installed on any platform at ECMWF (refer to GRIB API manual for internal use), while for external users the full GRIB API distribution (including GRIB tools) can be downloaded from here.

Roadmap

We are working to add the following features in the next releases.

shared library
interfaces for scripting languages
netcdf conversion
compression alghoritms
new documentation

Mailing list

Subscribing to the mailing list you will get information about new releases, bug fixes and new features being implemented in the future.

This is a hidden list, which means that the list of members is available only to administrator.

To subscribe to or unsubscribe from a mailing list, please send mail to

grib-api-request@lists.ecmwf.int

with the word subscribe or unsubscribe as Subject.

As part of the subscription process, the list software will send you an email to which you must reply in order to finish subscribing. This is a security measure to keep people from subscribing others to the lists without their permission.

http://www.ecmwf.int/publications/maillist/d/subrequest/grib-api

24.09.2009