Meteorology in Debian Science

The Sentinel page gathers meteorology packages.

Meteorology tools in Debian / currently being packaged

Data Manipulation

Libraries

Analysis and Visualization

Software that could be included in Debian

* MCT Model Coupling Toolkit. Used by ESMF and now OASIS3-MCT

Issues:

Earth System Grid

Basically, package all the code used in ESG nodes. Its all FLOSS code, and needs proper management and tools. To start with, this will need CDAT, Thredds and their dependencies.

CMOR tables

Currently there is a package cmip5-cmor-tables. There are a bunch more tables; see upstream ?here. Replace the cmip5-cmor-tables package with a cmor-tables package? I've created an Alioth packaging project for this.

SZIP Compression

SZIP is a compression library for HDF and other scientific data. HDF which we ship, can be built against it, but SZIP is patented (US only?) and is free for non-commercial use (ie. not DFSG-free). It is unlikely to change and we could not ship it (can it be shipped in non-free ?). However it would be desirable for HDF on Debian to be able to use it if present: hence a patch could be written to dynamically open it if present. The patent is owned by NASA who have agreed not to enforce it; it expires in a year or so. A GNU GPL'd version of SZIP is being written so that SZIP can be included in WMO standards.

Python and NetCDF

See this discussion. There are multiple packages in Debian/ the python archives providing NetCDF interfaces; some pass netcdf-type objects around. This is sub-optimal as they don't interoperate. This should be fixed.

Python packages / APIs include:

* pyCDF (circa 2007): * Scientific.IO.NetCDF : from python-netcdf or pupynere * scipy.io.netcdf : from scipy, or python-netcdf4

python-netcdf is built against recent netcdf4, and so reads/writes netcdf4 files, but does not provide NC4 capabilities such as compression, etc. Similarly python-scientific, python-netcdf do not provide python3 versions. Is python-scientific obsolete? Transition towards scipy ?

Python3 Transition

As part of the general transition in Debian/Ubuntu to Python3, it is my release goal for Jessie to get all the met. packages working with Python3.

See DebianScienceMetPython3 to see progress.

pkg-config pc files for all libraries

As a release goal, provide pkg-config files for all libraries provided by ?DebMet, and hence dependencies. This is most useful when thinking of MPI. See DebianSciencePkgConfig for details.

Spherepack

spherepack is packaged, but NCL uses a variant with double-precision parameters, preceded by 'd' prefix. Implement this within spherepack, and apply as an external dependency.

Common GRIB tables

grib-api and ncl have Grib tables that could be factored out into a separate package.

GSHHS : Global Self-consistent Hierarchical High-resolution Shorelines

Several packages include their own copies of GSHHS maps and code. These should be merged, and one set of maps provided. DebianScienceGshhsMaps describes the work in progress.