MARS software

ECMWF's Meteorological Archive and Retrieval System (MARS) is the software used to manage the Centre's archive of meteorological data and to provided access to the data. It has two main components, the MARS Server and the MARS Client.

The MARS software refers to both components. Users can modify this software to manage their own archives and provide access to these archives.

The MARS client can be used as a standalone software item by registered users to access the ECMWF meteorological archives.

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License :

This software is licensed under the GNU General Public version 3 License.

Description :

The MARS software is a product of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and was written in the Meteorological Applications Section (MetApps).

Some of the features of the MARS system are:

• provides facilities to archive and retrieve meteorological data;
• MARS holds Terabytes of data, mainly using GRIB format for meteorological fields and BUFR format for meteorological observations;
• for large archives, MARS needs a tape management system for off-line storage. Current tape management systems supported are Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), High Performance Storage System (HPSS), Veritas, VolCentre.
• provides monitoring facilities for operators and administrators;
• enables easy archive and retrieval access via a pseudo-meteorological language;
• batch and interactive modes are supported, including web access;
• supports large amounts of data, both in volume and number of items stored;
• supports a large number of users with differing requirements, e.g. retrieving large data sets occasionally or small data sets at frequent intervals;

The MARS Server is not an off-the-shelf product, as it needs to be tailored to a specific site. ECMWF provides the software on an as-is basis and cannot guarantee to support such an effort.

Charges :