Introduction

With the grib format, the binary precision of the grid point values is specified when the file is written. The grib format allows a precision up to 254 (simple packing) but no grib decoder supports that high precision. A reasonable limit to the precision is 24 which is the precision of an IEEE 4-byte floating point numbers and is easy for 32-bit computers to handle efficiently.

The -set_grib_max_bits option sets the maximum number of bits that can be used when encoding data into grib. The value should never be greater than 25 if you want to remain compatible with wgrib2 on 32-bit computers. (The limit may be different with other software.) The -set_grib_max_bits option does not set the binary precision of the grib output but prevents the precision from getting too large.

Usage

-set_grib_max_bits N
  N = maximum number of bits used to encode data

Comments

The -set_grib_max_bits option does not affect grib data written using the -grib option because the -grib option does not encode data but uses the current "in-memory" copy of the encoded data.

See alse: -set_scaling -set_bin_prec