The Binary Universal Format for the Representation of meteorological data (BUFR) is a data format created and maintained by the World Meteorological Organization. Code specifications, tables and other details may be found at: http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/www/WMOCodes.html

libECBUFR was developed by the Meteorological Service of Canada to provide a uniform BUFR API and library across the various meteorological and IT components of Environment Canada that encode or decode BUFR. The library is written in the C language, but can be used with other languages (via SWIG, for instance).

While the software is meant mainly to be used as a library of BUFR-related functions, it also comes with two utilities to decode and encode BUFR to and from ASCII templates.

The C code is quite generic and should compile on many platforms that can use the GNU toolchain.

Individuals and organizations are welcome to evaluate and use libECBUFR. Please read and understand the licensing terms under the Lesser General Public License, version 3.

Please be aware that the amount of direct software support we can provide is very limited and that we can make no promise in that regard. However, we would help in building community-based support. We do believe that there are many people and organizations in the meteorological community that can use this software, adapt it to their requirements and help us improve it. We hope that on that basis we can build a community of interest in a spirit of mutual benefit.

As of early 2013, the library source code is seeing fewer changes. This simply reflects the fact that the library meets current requirements and that it is performing as expected.

Questions? Feel free to ask. Or, perhaps we already have an answer in the FAQ: https://answers.launchpad.net/libecbufr/+faqs .