Writing NETCDF files form GRADS 1.94b?

[Arlindo da Silva]

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 2:47 PM, Kevin M Levey <klevey at customweather.com>
wrote:

> TUE 20MAY08: 1140PDT
> Dear Grads Users
>
> I was always under the impression that one could NOT write out NETCDF files
> from GRADS directly, but that you had to use LATS4D to accomplish this.
>
> However, on the latest update of the GRADS pages found at:
> http://grads.iges.org/grads/downloads.html
>
> I see this:
>
> The GrADS exectuables for versions *1.9 *and earlier are as follows:
> gradsc Reads GRIB, gridded binary, BUFR, GrADS station data
> Writes GRIB
> *gradsnc* Reads GRIB, gridded binary, BUFR, GrADS station data, NetCDF
> *Writes *GRIB, *NetCDF*
>
> Is this a mistake, and if not, how does one write NETCDF formatted output
> directly from GRADS 1.9b4? I thought one could only write gridded binary
> files. I have never been able to find any documentation regarding this
> (writing NETCDF output from GRADS). I know that version 2.0 is slated to
> have the NETCDF "write" functionality built into it in upcoming releases.
>

Since v1.7 you can write NetCDF/HDF and GRIB-1 files from GrADS using the
LATS interface. Basically you do a bunch of "set lats ..." commands, do a
"set gxout lats" and when you display a variable it goes into your netcdf or
grib-1 file. Lats4d is simply a GrADS script that serves as a frontend to
the LATS interface, a convenience script of sorts. (BTW, lats4d can also
serve as a front end to "set gxout fwrite".) Unfortunately, the LATS
interface has been removed from v2, so the only thing lats4d can do there is
to write binaries.

I am not aware of any documentation for the LATS interface. I learned how
use it by following Mike Fiorino's examples.  Lats4d has a built in man page
that documents (almost) all of its options (I left  some NASA specific
options undocumented as they are not relevant to the general user.)

   Arlindo


--
Arlindo da Silva
dasilva at alum.mit.edu
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