weatherunderground.com

[Tom Pollard]

On Apr 27, 2006, at 12:05 PM, Marck Oduber wrote:
> i've noticed that weatherunderground is producing real nice graphs/
> maps
> with grads.

Yes, they are nice.  It was from seeing those that I first became
interested in GrADS.

> Are those scripts [available] on the net? or one has to write them
> thereselves?

I contacted them about that last October, and was told that they
wouldn't release their scripts, at least not for now, mostly because
of the extra effort it would require on their part.  But, they don't
consider their scripts to be proprietary and suggested that they
might reconsider documenting and releasing them if enough people were
interested.

Also, they're actually using a locally modified version of GrADS, and
so their scripts probably wouldn't be directly usable with the
standard version of GrADS, anyway.  (Not sure if that's still true,
or not.)  Two specific things they mentioned were that they added
support for using anti-aliased fonts and for reading grib2 files.

Finally, it sounds like they use higher level scripts (presumably
Perl or Python scripts) to create the actual GrADS scripts that
produce each plot.  So, it's not like they have a simple GrADS script
that they use every time they need to produce a given plot.

If anyone has any more recent information, I'd be interested in
hearing it.

Cheers,

Tom