Getting started
First, we would thank you for your interest in MeteoIO. As primarily a library, MeteoIO is:
- a way to easily integrate meteorological data into an application
- an easy and robust way to automatically and transparently handle meteo data
- a toolbox at your disposal for enhancing your application
Although it is a library (meant to be used from within other applications), it comes with a command line application (meteoio_timeseries, see below) and can be directly used from within the Inishell Graphical User Interface. When using Inishell, you get the best of both worlds: a user friendly GUI while still keeping the possibility to run the generated ini configuration file in batch mode.
Let's get up and running!
First, you need to download MeteoIO, either as a pre-compiled package for your operating system or as source code (see page Getting MeteoIO). If you are getting the source code, you need to compile it (see page Compiling MeteoIO).
Even if we encourage you to rely on the Inishell Graphical User Interface, it is possible to manually edit the configuration files by hand with a good text editor. It is anyway a good idea to have one in order to edit input or output files. You can for example use Atom (multi plateform), Kate for Linux or Notepad++ for Windows.
In the "bin" subdirectory, there is a small standalone application "meteoio_timeseries" that can be used to process timeseries from the command line. This application can directly be called from the Inishell Graphical User Interface.
Moreover, a few very simple applications are provided in doc/examples and can prove useful:
- data_converter reads data with one plugin, processes it and writes it back with another plugin (so it can convert between data formats). It takes as arguments a starting date, end date and a timestep (in hours). Please note that for real usage, the meteoio_timeseries should be preferred;
- 2D_interpolations produces 2D grids (maps) at the provided timestamp;
- meteo_reading just prints on the screen the processed data at the provided timestamp.
Getting help
Please have a look at the dedicated page Getting Help.
Online help
The online documentation for the latest stable release is available as well as the online documentation for the git master (ie most recent development version).
Locally installed
From a binary package
An HTML documentation is available in the MeteoIO installation directory, in doc/html/index.html. Binary packages might have installed a link to this file in your start menu. A few code examples, with a very simple Makefile and some test input data are also part of the documentation. You will find them in the MeteoIO installation directory, in doc/examples.
From a source installation
A full doxygen documentation exists and is available starting in doc/MeteoIO_doc.html. If this documentation would not be part of your package, follow the instructions in Compiling MeteoIO, section "Generating the documentation".
you can regenerate it by typing make doc (you need doxygen installed on your system). In this documentation, you are encouraged to follow the quick overview link in order to get a general overview of the domains covered by MeteoIO. A few code examples are provided in doc/examples and can be a good starting point for experimenting with the library (although these examples are voluntarily very simple and in no way replace the proper documentation!).
From a documentation only package
If you have a source package but don't want to install doxygen, you can get a documentation only package. This is part of the various downloads that are offered with each release. It contains the html documentation as well as the code examples.