GrADS 2.0.a0

[Wesley Ebisuzaki]

All,

FYI: grib2ctl.pl has been replaced by g2ctl for GRIB2 files.

      http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/wesley/g2ctl.html

To run g2ctl, you'll need wgrib2 and perl.

     http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/wesley/wgrib2/index.html

                               Wesley



Jennifer Adams wrote:
> At long last, GrADS 2.0.a0 is released!
>
> Because NCEP will soon be distributing forecast data only in GRIB2
> format, we are releasing an alpha version of GrADS 2.0. We are still
> actively testing and debugging and documenting the code, but it is
> working well for us internally at COLA, and we feel the time is right
> for a public release.
>
> GrADS 2.0 is a significant upgrade from 1.9 in many ways:
> -- it has 'dtype grib2' and a new utility 'grib2scan'
> -- it has a fifth dimension for gridded data sets
> -- internal data handling is all double precision
> -- undef handling is cleaner
> -- the netcdf/hdf interface has been streamlined
> -- the executable names are different:
>        gradsc, gradsnc, and gradshdf are merged into 'grads'
>        gradsdods is now 'gradsdap'
>
> Because of these changes, and others that are still in the works but
> haven't been implemented yet, there are some features which we can no
> longer support. The UDF interface is disabled, but will be return soon
> in a new implementation that should be easier to use. The lterp()
> function (a widely used UDF) is now built-in. The LATS interface is
> gone, but implementing a new path for writing out netcdf with 'gxout
> fwrite' is very high on our to-do list. Templating with the 'sdfopen'
> command is also no longer supported, and some special cases of binary
> file formats are now a legacy: "var" and "z" transposed data
> (units=-1,1) and "x" and "y" transposed data (units=-1,30). The format
> of the GrADS metafile will also change, as graphics improvements are
> implemented. The gv utility will not work with GrADS 2.0. Otherwise,
> for now, everything you do with GrADS should work in version 2.
>
> I have posted the source code and two binary tarballs in:
>      ftp://iges.org/grads/2.0/ <ftp://iges.org/grads/2.0/>
> Binaries are for RedHatEnterpriseLinux5 (x86_64) and Intel Macs. If
> you are using GrADS on a unix platform of a different flavor, I highly
> recommend trying to build from source, since I will be posting updates
> to the source code very frequently. A list of the required
> supplemental libraries is in the documentation at
> http://iges.org/grads/gadoc/supplibs.html
> <http://iges.org/grads/gadoc/supplibs.html> . Almost all of these
> supplibs are upgrades from previous versions and build easily. I will
> update this doc page with additional guidance for building from source
> as soon as I can.
>
> To get you started with NCEP GRIB2, I have also posted a couple of
> sample descriptor files:
>    http://iges.org/grads/gadoc/gfs.ctl
> <http://iges.org/grads/gadoc/gfs.ctl>
>    http://iges.org/grads/gadoc/gfsens.ctl
> <http://iges.org/grads/gadoc/gfsens.ctl>
> The documentation on descriptor file elements (
> http://iges.org/grads/gadoc/descriptorfile.html )has been updated with
> information on the EDEF entry and GRIB2 handling.
>
> Please post comments and questions and bug reports here. As always, I
> must be able to reproduce a problem on my own systems in order to fix
> it, so keep that in mind when reporting bugs.
>
> Jennifer
>
> --
> Jennifer M. Adams
> IGES/COLA
> 4041 Powder Mill Road, Suite 302
> Calverton, MD 20705
> jma at cola.iges.org <mailto:jma at cola.iges.org>
>
>
>