Parse Météo France reflectivity radar BUFR files and output the corresponding TIFF files
- A C++23 compiler and standard library
- GDAL library 3.10 (e.g. for Debian: libdal-dev) v3.10 is the one that has been tested, previous versions likely to work as well to some extent, we don't use very advanced functions from GDAL
To execute the program, the BUFR descriptor tables, with local extensions by
Météo France, must be present in the working directory in the bufr folder,
following the hierarchy and format used by the ECMWF tools eccodes. See the
examples folder and the Usage section below for an example.
The tables have been extracted from the ECMWF data
and the Météo France documentation.
The Météo France tables
have been subsetted and converted to the ECMWF format by yours truly.
You may also need some understanding of the BUFR format, especially if the program doesn't do what you want and you wish to modify it.
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
makeThe debufrizer program expects an input file on the command line, and can
optionally accept a prefix for the output file. The output file will be named
<prefix><date>.tif where <date> is the date and time found in section 1 of
the BUFR file formatted as %Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S. The program outputs this date on
the standard output after parsing is done.
cd examples
../build/debufrizer reflectivity.bufr output_There is an additional script process.sh in the examples folder to show how to
use the Météo France API, the debufrizer program and the GDAL utilities to
output a reflectivity and an intensity map (the latter using Marshall-Palmer
formula.
To start using the Météo France API, go to their API portal, additional documentation on their wiki.
This program is probably only useful for Météo France radar BUFR files, and possibly other OPERA members files as well, although only Météo France reflectivity files have been tested. It's also unclear how much resistant to future format changes this program is.
Basically, it just looks through the file to find the grid size, checks that the projection is the only one it supports, finds a block of data the same size of the grid and corresponding to reflectivity data, and builds a TIFF file with that. Caveat emptor.
The code in the repository is licensed by: SAS JD Environnement 44C rue de Bray 35510 CESSON-SEVIGNE FRANCE contact@meteo-concept.fr
under the GNU Public License (GPL) version 3 or higher. The text of the license is available in the LICENSE file.
© SAS JD Environnement 2025