[gradsusr] Moving to grib data?

[Olli Myllynen]

Hello GrADS community,

I am using Grads to get 10 day GFS weather forecasts for Southern
Finland as a website administrator. I am not a metheorologist by
education, and thus have limited knowledge of the data systems in this
field.

So far I have been using ASCII downloads directly into Grads with a
command 'sdfopen
'http://nomads.ncep.noaa.gov:9090/dods/gfs_hd/gfs_hd'date'/gfs_hd_'hour'z'
date and hour being the relevant values. I am currently loading quite
a lot of data over the net though I only need to draw weathermaps from
much a smaller set of data.

The variables I need are (as Grads variables) for tmp2m, tmpsfc,
prmslmsl, ugrd10m, vgrd10m, rh2m and u. The subregion I need the data
for is between long 15-35 East and lat 50-70 North. The interval for
forecasts is 3 hours and the granularity is as small as possible, I
believe 0.5 degree is what is available.

Now I have two needs:
1) to download the necessary dataset but not much more than that
2) to get that data into Grads for making the forecast maps.

By searching and reading I think that I should get the data in
grib/grib2 data format, but here my knowledge ends. I have got the
get_gfs.pl perl script, but I am still lost now.

I have been trying understand what I should dowload and how, but have
not yet seen a page which would explain me this though I have searched
the web. Perhaps the problem is that I really do not know what to look
for. Could someone give me pointers to right direction, please?

Olli