The Unidata Users Committee has asked the WMO to consider establishing a web registry of GRIB and BUFR tables. Your comments on this idea would be helpful. And if you have any influence with the WMO, please use it!
Unidata developer John Caron spends a big portion of his time thinking about how to make the formats in which scientific data are stored more useful and robust. If you're a user of the GRIB or BUFR formats, or just have an interest in the long-term viability of data formats in general, read on.
Problems with external tables make BUFR/GRIB not suitable as long-term storage formats. To solve this, there must be a foolproof way for reading software to know what tables the writing software used, and there must be an authoritative registry of tables.
