GRIB2 templates and its usage at NCEP

National Center for Environmental Prediction's (NCEP) GRIB1 to GRIB2 and vice-versa conversion software and other GRIB1/2 application tools have been widely used world wide. NCEP generates several new operational products in GRIB2 format directly and has transitioned from GRIB1 to GRIB2 for existing applications that read only in GRIB1 format.

Major efforts are currently underway to create a comprehensive GRIB2 encode/decode capability for the modeling community to allow for post processed GRIB2 products to be generated directly from native output. The current NCEP GRIB2 library is inefficient as a result of the packing used in the serial version of GRIB2. In addition, the current GRIB2 library does not support the use of templates which cause users great difficulty to encode/decode their output into GRIB2 format. This project is being initiated to improve the encoding of the NCEP model GRIB2 products making use of different GRIB2 product template modules within the NCEP GRIB2 library.

NCEP's EMC has applied the GRIB2 templates' software and GRIB2 library to generate GRIB2 messages directly in the upcoming unified NCEP post processing system using the message passing interface Input/Output (MPI I/O) parallel processing methodology. The details of the GRIB2 templates' application software and its use in the parallel generation of GRIB2 messages will be discussed.