Accessing GRIB2 Local User Section Data (Section 2)

Question

I’m trying to crack into the National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) GRIB2 files, specifically the unique Local Use Section (in Section 2) containing the Weather Lookup Table unique to each forecast time.

While I have tried using the NOAA MDL’s DeGRIB GUI software, but I’ve had difficulty compiling it’s unix build.

I also need a solution that can be automated (preferably Python-based since that is what the rest of my project is using). I have tried working with pygrib and I can only get so far as to it returning the size of Section 2 of the pertinent message record and no further into Section 2. XArray with cfgrib presumes uniformity for a variable rather than one that varies per GRIB message, nor have I found a resolution with wgrib2 or eecodes.

Are there options in Python or command line UNIX that will permit access to the details within a GRIB2 message’s Section 2?

Answer 1

I can only think of two additional options to explore.

1. Use the python bindings to eccodes directly to try to dig into the message
2. Use the GRIB support in Unidata's netCDF-java library (or ToolsUI app), but that is clearly suboptimal for a mainly Python workflow