wradlib Documentation - Bitbucket

wradlib Documentation, Release 0.1.1
At the moment, the national RADOLAN composite is a 900 x 900 grid with 1 km resolution and in polarstereographic
projection.
Parameters fname : path to the composite file
Returns output : tuple of two items (data, attrs)
• data : numpy array of shape (number of rows, number of columns)
• attrs : dictionary of metadata information from the file header
References
[DWD2009]
3.2 Reading BUFR Files
The Binary Universal Form for the Representation of meteorological data (BUFR) is a binary data format maintained
by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The BUFR format was adopted by the OPERA program for the
representation of weather radar data. This module provides a wrapper around the OPERA BUFR software, currently
only for decoding BUFR files. In the future, functions for BUFR encoding might be added as well. If you intend to
work with BUFR data, we recommend reading OPERA’s BUFR software documentation.
decodebufr
parse_desctable
Main BUFR interface: Decodes BUFR file and returns metadata and values
Parses the decriptor table and returns a dictionary of descriptors
3.2.1 wradlib.bufr.decodebufr
wradlib.bufr.decodebufr(buffile)
Main BUFR interface: Decodes BUFR file and returns metadata and values
The BUFR file format is a self-describing binary format for meteorological data. wradlib uses
the decoding software from the OPERA 3 program. All background information is available under
http://www.knmi.nl/opera/bufr.html.
Basically, a BUFR file consists of a set of descriptors which contain all the relevant metadata and a data section.
The descriptors are identified as a tuple of three integers. The meaning of these tupels is described in the so
called BUFR tables. There are generic BUFR tables provided by the WMO, but it is also possible to define so
called local tables - which was done by the OPERA consortium for the purpose of radar data representation.
This decoding function returns a two element tuple. The first element of the return tuple is the actual data array.
It is a multi-dimensional numpy array of which the shape depends on the descriptor specifications (mostly it
will be 2-dimensional). The second element is a tuple of two dictionaries (descnames, descvals). descnames
relates the descriptor identifiers to comprehensible descriptor names. descvals relates the descriptor names to
descriptor values. E.g. if the descriptor identifier was (0, 30, 21), the descriptor name would be ‘Number of
pixels per row’ and the descriptor value could be an integer which actually specifies the number of rows of a
grid.
Parameters buffile : Path to a BUFR file
Returns output: a tuple with two elements (data, metadata) :
• data : the actual data as a multidimensional numpy array
• metadata : tuple of two elements (descnames, descvals)
38 Chapter 3. Library Reference