# GRIB -- WMO General Regularly-distributed Information in Binary form

GDAL supports reading of GRIB1 and GRIB2 format raster data, with some degree of support for coordinate system, georeferencing and other metadata. GRIB format is commonly used for distribution of Meteorological information, and is propagated by the World Meteorological Organization.

The GDAL GRIB driver is based on a modified version of the degrib application which is written primarily by Arthur Taylor of NOAA NWS NDFD (MDL). The degrib application (and the GDAL GRIB driver) are built on the g2clib grib decoding library written primarily by John Huddleston of NOAA NWS NCEP.

There are several encoding schemes for raster data in GRIB format. Most common ones should be supported including PNG encoding. JPEG2000 encoded GRIB files will generally be supported if GDAL is also built with JPEG2000 support via one of the GDAL JPEG2000 drivers. The JasPer library generally provides the best jpeg2000 support for the GRIB driver.

GRIB files may a be represented in GDAL as having many bands, with some sets of bands representing a time sequence. GRIB metadata is used to set band descriptions that may be helpful in deducing what each band is - for instance `100000[Pa] ISBL="Isobaric surface"` or `2743[m] GPML="Specific altitude above mean sea level"`. GRIB bands are represented as Float64 (double precision floating point) regardless of the actual values.

See Also:

- NOAA NWS NDFD "degrib" GRIB2 Decoder
- NOAA NWS NCEP g2clib grib decoding library
- WMS GRIB Format Documents