[gradsusr] GrADS Support

[Brian Doty]

Many thanks for all the wonderful emails.  I want to say a bit more about where we go from here.

Support for GrADS has not entirely ended.  But our efforts going forward will be on a volunteer basis.  We are not quite sure yet what impact this will have. We expect to continue to answer questions, to continue to fix bugs, and continue to issue new releases. And COLA will continue to help us out in various ways.

I see this as more of a transition process than a sudden break.  We plan to transition GrADS to a more traditional open source model for development and support.  This will take some time. 

The new release of GrADS that Jennifer just announced contains features that implement some long term thinking.  The web is an important part of our future strategy.  I am not sure if the following interface has been advertised here.  Just follow this link and click on the big red "submit" button:

http://wx.gmu.edu/pix/gform2.html

If you are at all familiar with grads, it will be reasonably obvious how to use the interface to obtain various plots (see below for a list of variable names to use in the expressions).  See if you can figure out how to do a vertical cross section!  This prototype interface has been around for a while. The interface runs GrADS on demand on the server to produce the requested plot. This prototype has some significant issues "under the hood". But it has been important for us, in that it showed us improvements we needed to make to grads for the longer term.  Many of those changes are now present in the latest version.

This is work that I plan to continue.  I'm still seeing a lot of fun stuff to do...   Brian

PS:  The web interface points to the current GFS model data.  Some of the variables in the descriptor file are:

Multiple levels:
z - Geopotential Heights
t - Temperature
u - U Wind 
v - V Wind
rh - Relative Humidity

Single level:
slp - Sea Level Pressure
ps - Surface Pressure
t2m - 2 meter temperature
p - Precipitation (over a 3 or 6 hour time period)