The reading support is now more generic: the time units are read and parsed from the file. The units are always corrected when necessary. If no date is provided and the file only contains the grid at one time step, it will be read by default. The DEM extraction from pressure data now works properly for any file (ie no more hard coded dates).

All the PNGs that we written were corrupt: the first line of data was missing. This has been fixed. for NetCDF, the ability to calculate the altitude from the pressure (and sea level pressure) has been added with a controlling key. This is not very precise but this could help for troubleshooting problems when no DEM has been provided (such as with ECMWF data sets).

A new date format has been added: RFC868. Two MeteoGrids have been renamed: ISW_DIR as ISWR_DIR and ISW_DIFF as ISWR_DIFF while a new grid has been declared (P_SEA). A few new constants have been declared. Some new links into the GRIB documentation as well as support for TAU_CLD. The NetCDF support is much improved, although there are still things left to do (writing grids out has been disabled for the moment, the parsing of the time units is currently not done, there is no support for automatically getting the data out of multiple files in a directory, etc).

The CNRM plugin can now be enabled and properly works. Its documentation has been updated and improved. The NetCDF plugin can now read DEMs using various schema/conventions and its documentation now matches the code. A few more MeteoGrids have been defined that are required for meteorological model outputs and for some future spatial interpolations (ISW_DIR, ISW_DIFF for example). The PNG plugin creates a few more EXIF fields in order to make it very easy to integrate in google earth (but it seems that google earth does not like indexed pngs). A bug computing the geolocalization of grids coming from NetCDF has been fixed (all grids were slightly off).

A bug has been fixed when doing nearest neighbour 2D interpolation. The GRIB plugin can now handle non-square cells (by resampling the domain). The cellsize and geolocalization in NetCDF are now handled the same way as in GRIB: the error is minimized in the center of the domain and the llcorner is back-calculated. Therefore very large domains are handled better. The first elements for supporting ECMWF grids have been implemented, the DEMs can now be read (but their remain as geopotential instead of height).

The WIN32 pre-processor variable has been renamed in MSWIN since this is more logical on Win64 (and to avoid potential conflicts). Some headers have been cleaned up in the process (in Timer.h/.cc). A new method has been moved from Config to FileUtils: isAbsolutePath. Some extra features (support for offset in hours) added to NetCDFIO.

Small clean up for the specific/relative humidity conversions. Small code clean up (mostly indentation) for NetCDF.

NetCDFIO: Now all the wrappers for libnetcdf have been put into a separate namespace called ncpp in separate files.

NetCDFIO: Full implementation of the STRICTFORMAT config option. By default all parameters, also those not conforming with the format are read and written, the user though may force conformity by setting the STRICTFORMAT parameter to TRUE in the io.ini [Input] and [Output] sections

NetCDFIO: Introducing the STRICTFORMAT config parameter for the io.ini when using the NetCDFIO plugin to read or write meteo data. This paramater is by default set to false meaning that meteo parameters that are not present in the CNRM standard for NetCDF files will also be read and written. Setting STRICTFROMAT to true means that only parameters defined in the CNRM standard will be regarded when reading and writing meteo data, all other meteo parameters will be ignored.

NetCDFIO: Further cleanup, readStationData revamped, added a method to check dimensions of a variable

NetCDFIO: Thanks to heavenly input by Mathias the 2D grid reading and writing is numerically consistent now. The only tradeoff is that precision of the cellsize is limited to 1cm, otherwise numerical instabilities may occur. 

NetCDFIO: deleting existing files before creating a new one when writing meteo data, everything else is too complicated for the moment

NetCDFIO: reading of meteo data from FORCING.nc implemented, cleanup and correct conversion of units necessary.

The cmake files for compiling with LibXML++ have been updated since they would not work with more recent Linux (but we should consider dropping LibXML++ and only rely on LibXML2 in order to reduce the dependencies and package finding mess). The special points are now called POI (Points of Interest, like for a gps device) in order to make them more familiar.

The plugins used to keep a reference to a config object as provided by IOManager. But this was triggering some warnings (reference to an object that might disappear outside of the constructor), therefore it has been replaced by a const copy (it is not yet 100% sure if this is really better, but at least the compilers won't complain).

When a user was provinding IMISIO with a non-existing station name, the error messages were quite cryptic. In order to properly tell the user what happened, the code has been slightly reorganized. Some code clean up also took place in IMISIO.

The plugins are no longer separately loadable libraries, but are fully incorporated into libmeteoio. All classes and facilities that provided capabilites for the dynamic loading were deleted (DynamicLibrary). IOPlugin now holds a function pointer to an instantiation function for children of IOInterface. In IOHandler::registerPlugins() all plugins need to be registered with the key name, the class name, a pointer to an instance of the class and a function pointer to the instantiation function for the class (child of IOInterface). IOInterface lost some complexity and thus the constructor of the base class does not have to be called in derived classes anymore.

The CMakeLists.txt files had to be updated to no longer make separate dynamically loadable libraries for each plugin, but to simply add the classes the user selectes to the meteoio library. 

As a side effect the io.ini key GENERAL::PLUGINPATH is no longer necessary.

A new plugin appears: GRIBIO, to read GRIB files (see issue 19). This is still extremely preliminary alpha code (enough warnings?!), but it should (hopefully) quickly evolve. A small naming inconsistency has been fixed in template.cc and all plugins now keep a reference to a Config object instead of a full copy (which means that the only full copy of a Config object should now be in IOManager and all other components should have a reference to it). 

This addresses the 2D part of issue 168: the ability to specify which meteo parameter and time step to read/write from/to a 2D grid. This should be the prefered reading method in the future, since it leaves to the plugin the task of building the file name, extension, database table, etc This also provides added metadata and more control over the writing process.

More size_t related issues have been found (thanks to the new snowpack server) and fixed. Basically, please remember that any variable used with/for the return value of a call to size() MUST be of type size_t (this becomes specially relevant in 64 bits).

The water triple point pressure has been updated to a better value.