Mesh Data Abstraction Library MDAL proudly joins the OSGeo Community program
We would like to share the excellent news that the OSGeo incubation committee kindly accepted the MDAL project into its Community Program. MDAL is an MIT Licensed C++ Library which integrates into your QGIS installation and is backed by the Lutra Consulting team and the wider community.
MDAL is a low-level library which allows reading unstructured mesh data from various formats. If you’ve never seen a QGIS Mesh Layer, then check out my presentation at FOSS4G 2019.
We kicked-off the MDAL project at the time we were migrating the Crayfish plugin to QGIS version 3. The Crayfish project started in late 2012, has more than 120,000 downloads and opened the way engineers and data scientists to visualize their hydro and meteo-data in QGIS.
QGIS uses MDAL to visualize, analyze and even modify data on unstructured meshes which are used by many hydraulic / numercial modelling solvers. In addition to providing abstraction for complex mesh data structures, MDAL also allows vectoral (e.g. wind speed) and temporal data to be visualised effectively and easily in QGIS.
The MDAL project (and therefore the wider community) has benefitted from generous sponsors such as TUFLOW, 3Di, Hydrotech, DHI, FLO-2D, Artelia, Federal Ministry of Austria for Agriculture, Regions and Tourism and many others. If you’d like to see your formats or workflows supported by QGIS then please consider becoming a sponsor or contact Peter at peter.petrik@lutraconsulting.co.uk
Right now we’re working on some new mesh frame editing tools for QGIS 3.22 (due for release in autumn 2021) and of course support for additional result file formats.