weatherunderground.com

[John Celenza]

Hello Folks :-)

Tom's information is exactly right.  Our GrADS scripts are generated
dynamically using software we wrote in an attempt to create a visualization
system where we could easily add or remove models without having to edit a
bunch of scripts.  That is really the biggest reason we haven't released any
of the scripts.

With that said, I could dump some of the dynamically generated scripts.  You
would have to play with them a bit to get them working, but it'd be a
start.  Any map you are most interested in, or feature you are interested in
(like the clock)?

The antialiased fonts shouldn't be a problem since your version of GrADS
will just use regular fonts. Grib2 may be an issue, but in the end, you'll
just have to modify which variable names are used by the script.

Let me know :-) My email is john at wunderground.com

And, look for a new interface to be launched soon!

-John


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John Celenza                     _( )_                 |
Director of Weather Technology  ( `   )_             \ _ /
Phone (415) 543-5022 x105      (    )  ( `)        -= (_) =-
FAX   (415) 543-5044         (__  (_ .  _) _)        /   \
john at wunderground.com          / / / / / /             |
                              / / / / / /
============================================================

On Thu, 27 Apr 2006, Tom Pollard wrote:

> 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
>