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HOME > Monitoring_and_Data > Oceanic and Atmospheric Data > Reanalysis: Atmospheric Data >
wgrib2 > wgrib2: submessages
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Submessages in wgrib2
In GRIB-1, each field was in its own record or message. Each message was
a self-contained enity. With GRIB-2, a message can contain a multiple
of fields or submessages. Why would someone add such a feature? I
figure that some people like to be organized. Put all the temperatures
into a message, put all the winds into another message and the heights
into a third message. It then becomes easy to "grab" all the temperature
data. Of course, if just want the data at 500 hPa, you are out of luck.
How does wgrib2 handle submessages
When you want an inventory of the file, you want to see all the
fields. If you want to extract the 500 hPa heights, you doesn't care whether it is
in a submessage. The only difference when using wgrib2 is that record number
may have decimal point and the submessage number if needed.
Most of the time, one can igore whether the data are in submessages.
In this wgrib2 inventory, the data are in one message with four submessages.
1.1:0:d=2000070312:HGT:500 mb:24 hour fcst
1.2:0:d=2000070312:TMP:850 mb:24 hour fcst
1.3:0:d=2000070312:UGRD:850 mb:24 hour fcst
1.4:0:d=2000070312:VGRD:850 mb:24 hour fcst
In this wgrib2 inventory, the data are in four messages.
1:0:d=2000070312:HGT:500 mb:24 hour fcst
2:114221:d=2000070312:TMP:850 mb:24 hour fcst
3:195862:d=2000070312:UGRD:850 mb:24 hour fcst
4:277503:d=2000070312:VGRD:850 mb:24 hour fcst
For either file, we can do
wgrib2 grib2_file | grep ":HGT:500 mb:" | wgrib2 grib2_file -i -text -o z500.txt
Wgrib2 "ignores" the submessage feature and makes the
the file look and handle like a file without submessages.
However, there are two options that allow you to preserve
the "submessage" character of the original grib file. The
option "-GRIB" writes out the entire grib message including
all submessages. The companion option "-submsg N", only
allows inventory processing of submessage N. (Usually N is set to one.)
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