Registration for 2016's "Data analysis and visualisation using Metview" training course is open. The course runs in September 2016.
This course provides an introduction to using Metview for the analysis, post-processing and visualisation of meteorological data stored in different formats. It will cover both interactive analysis and batch usage, following the workflow from the prototyping of data and graphical products to routinely generating them in a scheduling system. Case studies will be used to put these features into a practical context.
For details and registration, please see:
We are happy to announce the December 2015 release of the standard ECMWF software packages. The main change from the November releases is the new version of Emoslib. Version 4.2.1 of Emoslib was the first version which introduced full support for the new octahedral reduced Gaussian grid which ECMWF will use in its forecast system from Spring 2016 onwards. We were aware that this version had a suboptimal performance. This was addressed in the latest version 4.3.3 by rewriting parts of the necessary code. Tests have shown that the performance has been greatly increased and accuracy improved, but this causes values to change in some cases. We are happy that these changes are correct, but currently still evaluate them further. Therefore we ask users to test and evaluate Emoslib 4.3.3 carefully before using it operationally. There will be further news in this blog when the evaluation is complete.
All these packages use the same build system based on CMake - simplifying and harmonising the installation experience. If you encounter any issues please feel free to send us feedback to Software.Support@ecmwf.int.
ECMWF has released new versions of all its open source software packages. This release includes all versions of software necessary to decode, process and visualise the new octahedral reduced Gaussian grid which will be introduced into operations in 2016. We are currently working on some performance improvements for the new grid, which will be part of the next release of EMOSLIB.
Snapshot showing two new features in Magics/Metview: streamlines and clipping of winds at the subpage frame.
All these packages use the same build system based on CMake - simplifying and harmonising the installation experience. This is also the first time we also offer a so-called bundle for Metview. This is a tarball containing the source code for Metview and all its necessary software packages from ECMWF. This allows users who want to install Metview to just download one tarball and configure and build Metview and its dependencies in one go. We hope this will make the installation of Metview much easier. Since this is a new feature we are looking forward to hearing from users about their experiences with it.
Software | Version | Changes | Download page |
|---|---|---|---|
| GRIB-API | 1.14.3 | GRIB API version 1.14.3 | GRIB-API Releases |
| EMOSLIB | 4.2.1 | History of EMOSLIB changes | EMOSLIB Releases |
| Magics | 2.26.0 | Latest News | Magics Releases |
| Metview | 4.6.0 | Version 4.6 Updates | Metview Releases Metview Bundle |
Dear grib_api users
Version 1.14.0 of grib_api has been released. You can check the release notes in the following page:
https://confluence.ecmwf.int/display/GRIB/GRIB+API+version+1.14.0+released
The new version can be downloaded in the following page
https://confluence.ecmwf.int/display/GRIB/Releases
Please report any problems to software.support@ecmwf.int
Magics 2.24.7 has just been released as User Version on all our platforms.
This version is now used to generate all the operational plots for the new cycle.
We started working on the next version where new features will be added.
In the wish list, we have:
- Introduction of the Streamlines.
- Improved observation plotting and use of meteorological symbols
- Improved zoom mechanisms for cell/grid shading for Metview and ecCharts
We will keep you informed when the new developments will become available to test.
With gfortran 4.6 onwards, you run a real risk of invoking software-emulated 128-bit precision floating point operations when you thought you were asking for hardware-supported 64-bit operations. A symptom is that the linker requires -lquadmath to be added.
See this interesting article for more details:
libquadmath was introduced in GFortran 4.6 which fundamentally changed what the -fdefault-real-8 switch does. Rather than promoting all floating point arithmetic to double precision, it doubles the width of all floating point types, so explicitly typed double precision is converted to quad precision. This quad precision is orders of magnitude slower since it must be done in software, causing binaries built with -fdefault-real-8 to grind to a halt when built with GFortran 4.6 and newer.
The solution is to add -fdefault-double-8 to undo this implicit doubling of explicit real*8.
Guidance
When building ECMWF software which contains Fortran code, if you add -fdefault-real-8 then you should also add -fdefault-double-8 to the compiler flags. If the linker complains about missing quadmath symbols then you may need to rebuild the complete software stack - for example, you may encounter the problem when linking Metview, but the problem might have been generated when building emoslib. For CMake, this command-line option should work:
cmake ...... -DCMAKE_Fortran_FLAGS="-fdefault-real-8 -fdefault-double-8"
Addendum
The behaviour can be demonstrated with the following trivial Fortran programme:
program gfortran_test double precision :: a, b, c c = a + b end program
Compile this programme in 3 variants:
# Default precision gfortran test.F90 -o test_default # Double precision for real and double gfortran test.F90 -fdefault-real-8 -fdefault-double-8 -o test_double8 # Double precision for real, quad precision for double gfortran test.F90 -fdefault-real-8 -o test_double16
Verify that the last programme actually uses emulated quad precision and the remaining ones do not:
$ nm -a test_default | fgrep __addtf3
$ nm -a test_double8 | fgrep __addtf3
$ nm -a test_double16 | fgrep __addtf3
U __addtf3@@GCC_4.3.0
Note that gfortran >= 4.6 will always link libquadmath, regardless of whether quad precision emulation is actually required or not. In other words: if a library / binary links libquadmath, this is not yet a sufficient indication that quad precision double arithmetic is used.
Dear Emoslib users,
Version 000402 of Emoslib has been released, including a good number of new features and bug fixes. This is the first export version since 000392 (with exception of a CMake test release of version 000400). We would like to thank the users of the CMake test release who provided us with very useful feedback.
The highlight changes since version 000392 are:
- The installation is now using CMake to be in line with other ECMWF software packages
- Various bug fixes including for the bilinear interpolation with reduced Gaussian grids
- Support for new wave parameters introduced in CY41R1
- Add environment variable EMOSLIB_FILENAME_APPEND_LSM_GG to trigger non-default land sea marks (LSM) for rotated grids.
A full list of all changes for each Emoslib version can be found at
The new version can be downloaded in the following page
https://confluence.ecmwf.int/display/EMOS/Releases
Please report any problems to software.support@ecmwf.int
Magics 2.24.3 has now been released and can be downloaded from here.
| The rainbow technique for isolines has been improved allowing now the setting of colour, line style and thickness of each isoline. |
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| When using geos projection, you can now rotate the Globe by setting subpage_map_vertical_longitude |
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Metview 4.5.3 has been released. This version runs the new user interface by default and has received much testing from users.
- the complete list of changes in Metview versions is available here.
- Metview can be downloaded from here.
- it is recommended to use version 2.24 of Magics with this release of Metview
Dear grib_api users
Version 1.13.0 of grib_api has been released, including a good number of new features and bug fixes. You can check them in the following page.
https://confluence.ecmwf.int/display/GRIB/GRIB+API+version+1.13.0+released
The new version can be downloaded in the following page
https://confluence.ecmwf.int/display/GRIB/Releases
Please report any problems to software.support@ecmwf.int
Building and installing software, especially across different platforms has always been a time consuming and laborious task. We have been looking into improving this for ECMWF software packages.
Some users might remember a previous effort to migrate some packages to autotools, which brought some improvements from the previous scripted or handwritten Makefiles. But even the autotools as proved complex and are hard to maintain.
Moreover, we were looking for a uniform way to build all software packages, so that users only have to learn one process to build any package ECMWF provides.
After a review of possible alternatives, we decided build a common build environment based on CMake.
This tool is well established in the Open Source community (see KDE, LLVM+Clang, Trilinos, etc) and offers full cross platform support and system introspection.
This common build environment is called ecBuild, and is basically a collection of function extensions to CMake.
From the user perspective it is relatively invisible, but it provides many interesting features:
- unifies how ECMWF software finds its dependencies
- guarantees that all packages will find the same dependent library (e.g. same NetCDF library for Grib_api and Magics++)
- supports for out-of-source builds
- supports for MacOSX (and even Windows)
- supports for cross-compilation onn hybrid HPC super-computers
- builds faster (and in parallel)
- packaging and generation of RPMs and DEBs
- automated testing
We hope to see all packages (including Emoslib!) over the coming year using ecBuild.
By having all packages under the same installation set-up we hope to make the user experience consistent between packages and reduce overall maintenance effort.
Each package will continue to have their own package specific installation guide but all of these will refer to the general guidelines for CMake based installations at
https://confluence.ecmwf.int/display/DS/Software+installations
The current Metview desktop interface is based on the Motif GUI toolkit and was developed more than a decade ago. It has now been rewritten using Qt and an alpha version is already available for testing for dedicated users at ECMWF. This development was necessary to modernise the user interface and add new features which are commonly available in today's file manager applications. The usage of Qt, since it is a cross-platform application framework, could help us to migrate Metview to non-UNIX platforms in the future.
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One our design goals was to keep as much functionality as possible from the old desktop to make the migration for existing Metview users smooth and straightforward. Naturally the new desktop comes with plenty of new features such as: various icon views, folder bookmarks, improved folder navigation using breadcrumbs and a new set of icon editors. We plan to make the new desktop available for external users in an export release later this year.
On Friday 6th December 2013, the Metview developers (past and present) celebrated Metview's 20th anniversary. We attracted many users from within ECMWF to help us celebrate (the cake and drink may have helped!) and we took the opportunity to display some Metview posters, including a sneak preview of the new desktop user interface.
That same week also saw the change of default Metview version installed at ECMWF change from 3 to 4, marking an important milestone in the migration to Metview 4 - another reason for the celebration