BUFR

BUFR (Binary Universal Form for Representation of meteorological data) is a binary data format maintained by WMO. The earthkit-data interface supports both BUFR edition 3 and edition 4.

BUFRList

We can read/retrieve BUFR data with from_source. The resulting object will be a BUFRList representing a list of BUFRMessages.

The structure of a BUFR message is typically hierarchical and can be rather complex, so the recommended way to deal with BUFR data is to extract the required data with to_pandas() into a pandas DataFrame, which is much easier to work with.

The following table gives us an overview of the BUFRList API:

Highlights of the BUFRList API
Methods/Operators	API
Conversion to scientific Python objects	`to_pandas()`
Concatenation
Iteration
Selection with [...]
Selection with .sel()	`sel()`
Ordering with .order_by()	`order_by()`
Accessing metadata	`metadata()`
Inspecting contents	`ls()`, `head()`, `tail()`

BUFRMessage

A BUFRMessage represent a single BUFR message. It primarily offers methods to:

extract message data/metadata with metadata()

show the message structure with dump()

Examples:

BUFR: using TEMP data

BUFR: using SYNOP data