[GEMPAK #CRC-151060]: GEMPAK still supported?

> Your web page<http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/gempak/> says that NWS 
> development of GEMPAK ceased in 2008 and migrated to AWIPS II. However, the 
> GEMPAK 7.20 was released in April 17, 2015. So will GEMPAK be supported by 
> UCAR indefinitely? If so, what are its advantages over AWIPS II?


Hi Tom,

GEMPAK is still supported by Unidata and will be as long as it is supported by 
NCEP and used widely by our community.  As for the advantages, GEMPAK is a set 
of analysis and decoder programs for processing met data, mostly written in 
FORTRAN and C, while NAWIPS serves as the GUI front end.  Though AWIPS II will 
be the replacement for NAWIPS at NCEP national centers, it does not work 
exactly the same as NAWIPS.  CAVE serves as the GUI front end for AWIPS II, 
while data is saved in HDF5 and Postgres metadata on the back end.  I would say 
the advantages of GEMPAK over AWIPS II would be the ease of installation, the 
ability to script data computation and display from the command line, and the 
history of documentation and community discussion for troubleshooting. 

Michael



Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: CRC-151060
Department: Support GEMPAK
Priority: Normal
Status: Open