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GEMPAK Vs. GrADS


OhioBlizzard

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Hello, I was looking for opinions of what people thought of the two. I am doing some research in meteorology on the mesoscale level and am needing to look at past data, primarily from nomads. With that being said, I would like to be able to have the ability to create farily high resolution charts, i.e. low level flow streamlines, temps, upper air maps, surface obs, etc. I would also weigh in ease of use as I am not the most computer savvy person, but do have some basic programming experience. I would love to hear the thoughts of some who have prior experience with either or both.

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Power GEMPAK user, dabbled in GrADS...pretty computer savvy, work in Windows, Unix (AIX, Solaris), Linux (many flavors).

 

For someone not super computer savvy, GEMPAK is probably much easier to learn and more straightforward to use.  If you're a beginner though the maps you create aren't too pretty.  You can play with it and make pretty pictures with GEMPAK but its a bit more advanced though not difficult.  GrADS on the other hand makes more pretty pictures but in my opinion, is much harder to learn and manipulate to make imagery.  Maybe I didn't give it a chance or I was so used to GEMPAK that my mind couldn't get around it easily.

 

Summary:

 

GEMPAK: easier to use, not as pretty pictures

GrADS: a bit more difficult to learn to use, pretty pictures

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GrADS, hands down. Although not as user friendly as GEMPAK for the beginner, I find that it's definitely worth the extra time it takes to learn it as I've discovered that it provides a lot more flexibility than GEMPAK when it comes to creating custom functions to calculate and display things. GrADS has it's own scripting language which I use for a lot of my work. I think it may even be faster than GEMPAK for things that are computationally expensive, but I need to do more side by side testing to confirm this since I haven't used GEMPAK in a while.

 

I use a variant called OpenGrADS (http://opengrads.org/) which is open source and has a number of additional built in functions that can make for more ease of use. It's a lot simpler to install than GEMPAK since it doesn't require any dependencies and a properly configured environment. It will run in any OS and even from a thumb drive if you wanted to since it's just a simple executable that can be invoked from a terminal window. 

 

I will also echo that GrADS produces superior graphics...WeatherBell's plots are generated by GrADS.

 

Best thing of all about GrADS...no need to type in gpend before quitting.  ;)

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Great stuff ohleary and wxmanmitch, your info is much appreciated! I think I am going to give GrADS a go. I downloaded the superpack.exe from http://opengrads.org/, but am having trouble opening up grib files. Are there some other files that also must be downloaded from the file list at http://sourceforge.net/projects/opengrads/files/ in order to open grib files, or will the superpack suffice?

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