<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Dear All (on both lists): <div><br><div>I have posted a new version of GrADS: 2.0.a8. The GrADS downloads web page (<a href="http://iges.org/grads/downloads.html"><font color="#001fdf" style="color: rgb(0, 31, 223); "><u>http://iges.org/grads/downloads.html</u></font></a>) has been updated with links to the source code and a few pre-compiled binaries. This release has many new features, including several that were required to support COLA's work with extremely high resolution data sets. </div><div><br></div><div>GrADS version 2.0.a8 is linked with netCDF-4, which supports compressed netCDF files and also has a new OPeNDAP interface for gridded data sets. This new version of the netCDF library makes it possible to have a single, fully-functional GrADS executable, named "grads". The support for reading and writing compressed netCDF is mostly invisible, except that the I/O is faster, and the compressed files take up a lot less disk space. The use of compressed netCDF has been fully integrated into the workflow at COLA, and has quickly become essential to our operations. We encourage all netCDF users to try it out and see for yourselves how much time and disk space this data format can save. The netCDF-4 support includes new commands (q cache, q cachesf, set cachesf, set chunksize), new options to 'set sdfwrite' (-nc3/-nc4, -chunk, -zip, -flt/-dbl), and a new descriptor file entry: CACHESIZE. Please begin by reading the User's Guide page entitled "Reading and Writing Compressed Data Sets" at <a href="http://iges.org/grads/gadoc/compression.html">http://iges.org/grads/gadoc/compression.html</a> . A side benefit to the netCDF-4 development was that it led to an improvement in the HDF5 interface, which is now significantly faster than in the previous release. </div><div><br></div><div>GrADS version 2.0.a8 also supports reading and drawing shapefiles. The shapefile interface is adapted from an original design by Graziano Giuliani. There are several new commands: 'draw shp', 'q shp', 'q dbf', and 'set shpopts', and a User's Guide page entitled "Drawing and Querying the Contents of a Shapefile" at <a href="http://iges.org/grads/gadoc/shapefiles.html">http://iges.org/grads/gadoc/shapefiles.html</a> . </div><div><br></div><div>COLA's work with extremely high resolution data sets led to a bunch of changes to the GRIB interface. We added support for GRIB1 and GRIB2 files that are greater than 2Gb. This is handled with a "-big" option to gribmap. A simple change to the user interface, but a fairly significant change to code "under the hood." The gribmap utility now also supports the "-b" option for GRIB2 data sets, a option that is required for the new CFS Reanalysis. Both gribmap and wgrib have been modified to support ECMWF grib files that have record lengths bigger than 8MB. </div><div><br></div><div>There is a new graphics output option that is useful for the interactive display of high-resolution data: 'set gxout imap'. This quickly draws shaded grid boxes just like 'gxout grfill', but the metafile is not updated so printim and print will not work. But it saves a lot of time when browsing through data and 'fishing' for something interesting to look at. </div><div><br></div><div>Two final miscellaneous items in the new release: </div><div>* Added template substitution strings %t4, %t5, %t6, %tm4, %tm5, %tm6</div><div><div>* New command 'q contours' returns contour colors and levels</div><div><br></div><div>Finally, if you have not done so already, please subscribe to the new forum, as the folks at CINECA will be shutting down <a href="mailto:gradsusr@list.cineca.it">gradsusr@list.cineca.it</a> very soon. </div><div><br></div><div>--Jennifer</div><div><br></div><div>p.s. For those of you that build GrADS from src, the configure script will look for $SUPPLIBS/bin/nc-config to find out if the netcdf library is DAP-enabled. I have also added libncurses.a to the supplibs collection, in an effort to make the linux builds more portable. Please look at <a href="http://iges.org/grads/gadoc/supplibs.html">http://iges.org/grads/gadoc/supplibs.html</a> for links to all the latest versions of the libraries that I am using. There are newer versions of curl, hdf5, and netcdf, and libdap and gadap had be be rebuilt with the newer version of curl. </div><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; ">--</span></div><div apple-content-edited="true"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><div>Jennifer M. Adams</div><div>IGES/COLA</div><div>4041 Powder Mill Road, Suite 302</div><div>Calverton, MD 20705</div><div><a href="mailto:jma@cola.iges.org">jma@cola.iges.org</a></div><div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span></span></div></span> </div><br></div></div></body></html>