GRIB - GRIdded Binary or General Regularly-distributed Information in Binary form, is a data format used in meteorology to store historical and forecast weather data. GRIB_1 and GRIB_2 files are the most used versions as GRIB_0 files is no longer operational.
Difference between GRIB1 and GRIB2 -
GRIB1 is the original format and requires a separate parameter table to unpack the data. GRIB2 improves upon the standard with file compression and the inclusion of the metadata/parameter table that you need to unpack the data in each file. GRIB2 exploits the same compression software commonly used for images to gain a roughly 50% reduction in Hile size over GRIB1.
The Xarray library in python is very helpful in opening GRIB files. Once unpacked, the data can be converted into a dataframe and sliced/manipulated using pandas functions.