[ncl-install] test problem with ncl

[Mary Haley]

On Apr 8, 2013, at 2:00 PM, Alberto Mario Striedinger Pinilla wrote:

> MAry!!
> 
> 
> I will kiss you for ever XD. Thank you very much, it did work, the first screen was black but then the earth globe appeared with South Africa in colour XD.... Still, so that means I do not have the NCARG tools, ok I though they were not needed... One question tough. I am working with WRF 3.3.1 with .nc files as outputs, I now can use ncl fro handling them but will NCARG tools help me better for certain areas ?? or plots? I specially heard someone saying I could couple ncl with something else for 3D ploting of variables and layers as well. That would be amazing  and extremely useful for my results.

Hi Alberto,

There's rarely a time when I tell people to use NCAR Graphics over NCL for creating 2D plots. One exception is if you need to draw vectors and streamlines over a triangular mesh, then that is something we have at the NCAR Graphics level (via VASPACKT) but not yet at the NCL level.  At the NCL level, you would need to regrid your vector data to a 2D grid first before you could create a Vector plot.

NCL gives you much more power than NCAR Graphics, because it also has great file I/O (netcdf, hdf, grib 1/2, ascii, binary), and a large library of computational functions.

For 3D plots, both NCAR Graphics and NCL are limited. They use the "TDPACK" software to do some basic 3D rendering, but for WRF data, I would recommend looking at VAPOR:

http://www.vapor.ucar.edu

VAPOR does have some coupling of NCL in order to do WRF graphics.  See our "Using NCL with VAPOR to analyze WRF ARW data in 3D":

http://www.ncl.ucar.edu/Applications/wrfvapor.shtml

--Mary

> 
> Have a nice day XD.
> 
> Regards,
> ALberto STriedinger 
> 
> Alberto M. Striedinger. P.
> Student Intern Researcher at MeteoConsult .NL.
> MSc. Sustainable Energy Technology
> Eindhoven University of Technology
> BSc.Mechanical Engineering
> Universidad del Norte & USF
> +31    
> 
>      
> 
> 
> On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 6:05 PM, Mary Haley <haley at ucar.edu> wrote:
> Hi Alberto,
> 
> The "cpex08.ncgm" is a special file format only recognized by NCAR Graphics tools, and not generic Linux tools.
> 
> Trying using "ctrans", which comes with NCL/NCAR Graphics:
> 
>     ctrans -d X11 cpex08.ncgm
> 
> You will need to click on the window that pops up with your left mouse button to advance through the frames, and/or to close the last window.  I believe this NCGM file only has one frame.
> 
> --Mary
> 
> On Apr 7, 2013, at 8:47 AM, Alberto Mario Striedinger Pinilla wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have just installed the binary files fro ncl-6.xx and the ncl test was successful, the ncarg test was not successful at the beginning so I installed the -dev libraries.. then when testing ncarg cpex08 -clean, the file  (.ngcm) was created but I am trying to find a way to open it and see what is inside but I cannot open the file, not even with an editor like gedit,, linux just tells me I have no application for that file...
> >
> >  is it normal after the test... I mean, I had an output in the terminal an the file was created but it is supposed to be a plot right? like with the ncl test? am I mistaken?
> >
> >
> > KIndly,
> > ALberto STriedinger
> >
> >
> >
> > Alberto M. Striedinger. P.
> > Student Intern Researcher at MeteoConsult .NL.
> > MSc. Sustainable Energy Technology
> > Eindhoven University of Technology
> > BSc.Mechanical Engineering
> > Universidad del Norte & USF
> > +31
> >
> >
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