Information about NCL V5.2.0

Ian "Harry" Harris asked about V5.2.0 in another message, and I
thought I'd use a separate email to answer.

We are fervently working on this release and trying to tie up some
loose ends.

Plans that we have for this release include:

   - New types like unsigned integers/longs
   - New conversion functions, "tofloat", "toint", "todouble", etc.
   - Support for reading HDF-EOS5 files
   - Direct PNG output via a new cairo driver
   - New PS/PDF drivers (the PDF driver will produce compressed, and
hence smaller, files)
   - A new "true" conservative regridding algorithm that will
     replace the "almost" conservative regridding function
'area_hi2lores'
   - More xxx_n style functions to avoid having to reorder data for
computations
   - New function for generating pie charts
   - Several new color tables contributed by MeteoSwiss
   - The usual bug fixes and small improvements to existing functions

One issue we have is that Unidata is no longer officially supporting
the calendaring software on which ut_calendar and ut_inv_calendar is
based. This is causing several developers to either drop Udunits and/
or write their own calendaring software. We are looking into this
route ourselves; NCL users have contributed ideas and/or
code that we might be able to use for a quicker solution. (Thanks Dave
Allured, David Pierce, and Charlie Zender, to name a few.)

We are currently working on some GRIB improvements, testing/cleaning
up the PNG driver, finishing up the new types, and testing NCL on
several
systems against new versions of external libraries. We will also wait
until V4.1.0 of NetCDF is released so we can use its version of the
OPeNDAP libraries, and Udunits-2 (for backwards compatibility, if
needed).

We haven't updated this URL in full, but we'll add more information
to it as we go:

     http://www.ncl.ucar.edu/future_release.shtml

--Mary

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Received on Fri Jan 22 11:52:02 2010