general weather sotware help

[Jim Marusak]

i just got canned recently (what particular reason i don't have the liberty to say in public, but it's not based on performance per se). and well, there are some positions i am seeing now where i might have a shot with my other experience to get a new job, but the one thing holding me back on some of the jobs is not having experience running programs like grads, gempak, etc.

 

so question for the folks is..  in between sending resumes and such, if i know my computer can run it, i'd like to maybe start learning the packages like grads, gempak, etc (as to why i haven't had to before, my previous jobs didn't need me to learn those packages, as weird as that sounds). but none of the pages that have the gempak or grads software say on there what you need in system requirements to run them. so what's recommended for running those these days?

 

thanks.

[wxjoe]

Do you have basic programming experience? What exactly do you want to learn? GrADS/Gempak/etc aren't exactly plug and play software. You should have a good knowledge of how to get around on the command line.

 

To answer your question... it depends on what you're doing. GrADS can run on any box really, it just depends what you're creating with it and how much time you're willing to wait for a plot to be drawn. Unless you're dealing with massive datasets, however, any box will do. I prefer mac/linux, but there are packages that make it easy to run on Windows, too. (Pro tip: use OpenGrADS - it's the same basic GrADS but with added features.) I run GrADS on a low-end Mac Mini and it runs fine.

 

For GEMPAK... I have no experience compiling/installing, but you'd probably want a mid-range machine.

 

However, before you go installing random graphics packages, you probably want to get a handle on basic programming if you don't already. Learn basic shell scripting. Learn a language like Python, too, if you don't already have familiarity with a programming language. Doing this will make learning graphics packages much easier.

[Jim Marusak]

ok, that's what i wanted to know. so it's a matter of learning the programming as well. I have done the old line-scripting thing of the old dos days and wasn't a bad programmer back in college using fortran 77. but i know things have changed a lot since then. oh well. time to see if i can get some cheap programming books so i can get back into that habit. because as i said, I haven't done much with it since college, and that was back in the mid 90's.

 

thanks