20000120: Update to GEMPAK

>From: Andy Detwiler <address@hidden>
>Organization: South Dakota School of Mines and Technology
>Keywords: 200001201718.KAA23022

>We at SDSMT have an older version of GEMPAK,  installed in 1998,  that
>did not make a graceful transition to the new millenium (if indeed we
>are now in the new millenium?).  It has not been updated since
>installation, and has received very little attention other than from the
>weather nuts who use it. We it run on SGI machines, in IRIX 6.3.  Our
>computer and network guru, Karl Lalonde, has tried to find an update to
>GEMPAK, either the source code, or a compiled version for IRIX 6.n, and
>has been unsuccessful.  Karl is a computer guy, not a weather guy. I am
>a weather guy, but not a computer guy. I told Karl I would contact you
>to ask for information on where to go to get a version of GEMPAK
>suitable for our IRIX operating system. Please help us out.
>
>-Andy Detwiler
>605-394-2291
>address@hidden
>


Andy,

Someone at SDSMT should probably subscribe to our gembud email
list so that you are aware when new distributions, bug fixes,
and new features are available.

You can download the current distribution- with many of the year 100 of the 
20th century features from our ftp site:
host: ftp.unidata.ucar.edu
login: gbuddy
passwd: XXXXXX

once you are connected, cd to the nawips-5.4 directory and download the
gempak54upc_pl15.tar.gz

Since this is the complete distribution, you should place it in a clean
directory and not in your current $NAWIPS directory- otherwise building
will be a problem.

The easiest way to build the new distribution is to mv your current distribution
to a backup directory name, then create a new directory and unpack the 
tarfile contents there. For example, if you currently have $NAWIPS 
defined as /home/nawips, then
mv /home/nawips /home/nawips.bak
mkdir /home/nawips

cd /home/nawips
<ftp the distribution>
gunzip -c gempak54upc_pl15.tar.gz | tar xvf -

Once you have unpacked the distribution, edit the Gemenviron file
and define the NAWIPS location to your installation directory
(you can refer to your old Gemenviron file for data directory locations etc,
but probably should just use it as a guide with the new distribution in case
your old version Gemenviron is missing some of the things that the
current distribution defines).

You need to define NAWIPS in Gemenviron to build. After you have the 
distribution built,
you can worry about defining the other datafile locations.

After editing Gemenviron, "source Gemenviron" in your csh to define your
directory locataions. Verify that $NAWIPS is correctly set with:
echo $NAWIPS

The build Gempak with:
cd $NAWIPS
make all 

when that completes, install the executables and clean the build tree with

make install
make clean

Our current OS that we test our software for SGI is IRIX 6.5.6.

After building and installing, you should setup the Gemenviron data locations 
for
GEMDATA, HDS, SAT, and TEXT_DATA. If you are running Gempak decoders from
your LDM, make sure the new decoder binaries from $GEMEXE are being used,
and the $GEMTBL station and packing tables are being used.

If you moved your old distribution out of the way and installed the
new distribution in the same location as the old, then you won't have
to change much. Your users should already be sourcing the Gemenviron file
from that location.

The last step will be to edit the $GARPHOME/config/Garp_defaults file
if you use garp to define the model_keys and proj and garea names
associated with how you store model data in your $HDS directory.
The keys are unique identifiers that match the file names in the HDS directory.
These are also used to define subdirectories under $GARPHOME/fdf/scalar and 
vector
so that you have appropriate model fields for each different model.


Steve Chiswell