NCL vs. WRF_NCL

Hi, we're going to have a couple of students spending the
summer helping to evaluate WRF performance as compared
with observations, Real-Time Mesoscale Analysis, etc. This
will mean lots of graphics produced, lots of "diff" graphics
(depicting difference between variables in different model
runs), etc. NCL will be our means for producing all of these.

I'm still quite the beginner with NCL, but thanks to the many
wonderful examples on the NCL website, I've found it to be
somewhat trivial to produce visuals of my WRF netCDF output,
so I'm pretty happy with it all and feel like this will serve our needs,
and will offer the flexibility to additionally view GRIB output files,
output files from other models, etc.

However, I'm also aware of, and have tried, WRF_NCL. It's my
somewhat uneducated view that WRF_NCL is simply a set of
higher level functions and scripts tuned to the purpose of producing
nice graphics strictly from the netCDF WRF output files. This is all
great, and I can see many uses for it, but I suspect it may be a little
too specialized for our work right now. Am I correct in my assessment?

In a few weeks I'll need to be getting these students up to speed on NCL,
and my inclination is to initially avoid WRF_NCL and focus on NCL
(they're good computer science students, so I think they'll cope fine).
Can anybody think of a reason why it would be a mistake to rely solely
on NCL and avoid WRF_NCL for now? I'm just wondering if perhaps
WRF_NCL addresses any peculiar issues that NCL might have in dealing
with the WRF netCDF output files.

Thanks for any guidance,

Don Morton
Arctic Region Supercomputing Center / U. Montana
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Received on Wed May 16 2007 - 09:44:37 MDT