MeteoIO 2.4.2: a preprocessing library for meteorological data

Abstract

Using numerical models which require large meteorological data sets is sometimes difficult and problems can often be traced back to the Input/Output functionality. Complex models are usually developed by the environmental sciences community with a focus on the core modelling issues. As a consequence, the I/O routines that are costly to properly implement are often error-prone, lacking flexibility and robustness. With the increasing use of such models in operational applications, this situation ceases to be simply uncomfortable and becomes a major issue. The MeteoIO library has been designed for the specific needs of numerical models that require meteorological data. The whole task of data preprocessing has been delegated to this library, namely retrieving, filtering and resampling the data if necessary as well as providing spatial interpolations and parameterizations. The focus has been to design an Application Programming Interface (API) that (i) provides a uniform interface to meteorological data in the models, (ii) hides the complexity of the processing taking place, and (iii) guarantees a robust behaviour in the case of format errors, erroneous or missing data. Moreover, in an operational context, this error handling should avoid unnecessary interruptions in the simulation process. A strong emphasis has been put on simplicity and modularity in order to make it extremely easy to support new data formats or protocols and to allow contributors with diverse backgrounds to participate. This library is also regularly evaluated for computing performance and further optimized where necessary. Finally, it is released under an Open Source license and is available at http://models.slf.ch/p/meteoio. This paper gives an overview of the MeteoIO library from the point of view of conceptual design, architecture, features and computational performance. A scientific evaluation of the produced results is not given here since the scientific algorithms that are used have already been published elsewhere.