Writing model output to FDB (GRIB)

[backeb]

Short Description of the issue

For DestinE, data needs / should to be written to FDB to leverage DestinE's federated data management.

FDB requires that the data compliant with the WMO standard.

Here we discuss the requirements to do so and whether or not this is within scope for interTwin.

[WOTrompDeltares]

Currently our flood map output is netcdf format. It should be possible to write this in grib format instead, but we'd need to know what it means for our data to be WMO compliant

[awarde96]

FDB is also able to work with netcdf directly with some tuning of the metadata in the netcdf, this may be a solution.

As mentioned converting youre netcdf files to grib is the most straightforward solution however this is quite difficult as grib has strict metadata and format requirements. There are a few tools out there to do this like cdo ( https://code.mpimet.mpg.de/projects/cdo) and YAC (https://dkrz-sw.gitlab-pages.dkrz.de/yac/) but these take quite a bit of work and knowledge of the netcdf files and grib to get working.

I'm currently trying to find out if this has been done internally in an easier way as this problem has come up in a few contexts in other use cases also.

[backeb]

notes from meeting with THomas

• FDB can work with a lot of different files in the backend
• netcdf files are a bit too liberal in terms of metadata, fdb can interpret grib better
• YAC can write directly to fdb, this could become a generic way to write to fdb

action

• explore using YAC to write data to fdb. YAC can output to many different formats and has a community around it.
• collaborate with DT-GEO and GLORI who also need this functionality