What's new with the NCAR Command Language (NCL)

This weather map was generated with NCL by Greg Thompson of the Research Applications Program

by Mary Haley N CAR Graphics software users will be interested in number of new developments with NCL: NCL is now offered free to the general public. An official NCL Home Page has been created. NCAR's Climate Global Division (CGD) has created an extensive CSM Graphics Tutorial that includes lots of step-by-step NCL examples for use with the Community Climate System Model. CGD has held several NCL workshops at NCAR and offsite, and may offer more in the future. An NCL email list has been created for users to exchange information. The growing list of NCL functions and procedures has been reorganized both categorically and alphabetically. What is NCL anyway? The NCAR Command Language (NCL) is a programming language designed specifically for the access, analysis, and visualization of data. You can run NCL in interactive mode, where each line is interpreted as you enter it at your workstation, or in batch mode as an interpreter of complete scripts. The power and utility of NCL are evident in three areas: File input and output. NCL reads in several data formats (netCDF, HDF, GRIB, CCM history tape, ASCII, and binary), and gives you immediate and easy access to the metadata in the file (where applicable). Data processing. NCL contains over 300 built-in data processing functions, including specialized climate and model routines. You can also call Fortran or C subroutines from NCL scripts, making NCL infinitely configurable. Graphical display. NCL generates publication-quality graphics on the fly using several specialized plotting scripts. NCL documentation Getting Started Using NCL. This document is mainly for new users of NCL, but it also contains information useful for more experienced users. At the heart of this document is the "Learning NCL by example" chapter, where some NCL functions and procedures are introduced that provide a basic interface to the plotting capabilities of NCL. A hardcopy version of this document is available by request for local NCAR/UCAR users. See "For more information," below. NCL Reference Manual. This document provides a full description of the NCL programming language, including information on supported data formats, functions and procedures, data types, variables, expressions, statements, and other advanced topics. For more information For more information or questions on NCL, send e-mail to haley@ucar.edu or call Mary Haley at 303-497-1254.