The data visualization software NCAR Graphics has been upgraded to version 4.1.1 on all of ITC's Unix machines (RS/6000, Sun, SGI, and Linux) and is available for mounting to departmental machines from the ITC Unix server jeeves.itc.virignia.edu. This version now provides three user interfaces for data processing and visualization as described below.

NCAR Command Language Interface: The NCAR Command Language is a powerful interpreted language for reading, writing, and manipulating scientific data. It uses an internal netCDF data model, but handles input data in a variety of formats. The command language provides many functions for manipulating data (including sorting) as well as arithmetic and trigonometric functions. As part of an integrated package, the NCAR Command Language can create any visualization supported by the High-Level Utility interface, including XY plots and contour plots with maps, legends, labelbars, and other annotations. You can use the command language's looping constructs to create animations; you can also subscript arrays directly with latitude and longitude values. You can execute the NCAR Command Language interactively from the command line or as a batch script.

High-Level Utility Interface: The NCAR Graphics package includes a High-Level Utility library, which provides routines to create and manipulate graphical objects. This interface makes it easier to produce complex visualizations. The interface includes both Fortran and C bindings. Low-Level Utilities Interface: NCAR Graphics software continues to provide about 500 low-level plotting routines. Both Fortran and C bindings will continue to support your NCAR Graphics code in an upwardly compatible manner.

Information on using NCAR Graphics is available in the README link off the Research Computing Support homepage at the URL, http://www.itc.virginia.edu/research/ncar.html Documentation for NCAR Graphics is available through the Web (see the above URL).