set button

Sets up the color characteristics of a button widget. The syntax is:

set button <button_ON_colors> <button_OFF_colors> thickness

redraw button

Redraws button number num to either the "ON" state (1) or "OFF" state (0).  

draw button

draw button number xpos ypos width height string

Draws a button centered on xpos,ypos with the following attributes:  

There are many supplemental libraries that are required to enable various features in the grads executable. Building all these libraries from source is not necessarily easy; this page provides some guidance and suggestions that have led to success on COLA's unix systems (64-bit linux running CentOS, and Mac OSX). COLA's objective in building grads is to make our binary releases portable, so we strive to build all the libraries from scratch, disabling features grads doesn't need, and then link statically when building grads. If you are building GrADS from source but not planning to distribute your build, then you may find that many of these libraries are already installed on your system and you can link with them dynamically. In this case, use the --enable-dyn-supplibs option with the GrADS configure script. Please post questions about building from source to the GrADS Users Forum. If you have the proper privileges, you may install these anywhere on your system instead of $HOME, just be sure to change the commands listed in the table below to accomodate your own installation. 

Reading BUFR Files with grads

BUFR (Binary Universal Form for the Representation of meteorological data) is a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) standard for storing observational data (aka sequence or in-situ data). BUFR is self-describing data format and can store a large amount of data and metadata in a small amount of disk space by using look-up tables and bit-by-bit packing.

There is a grads interface for BUFR, which means that BUFR data can be read directly in their native format and are handled as a grads station data set with all the associated display an analysis capabilities. grads requires a specially-formatted descriptor file to read BUFR data; the output from bufrscan, an external grads utility, is used to compose the descriptor file.  

set black

set black val1 val2

Contours not drawn within this interval. Reset by clear or display.

About grads Gridded Data Sets

This section describes grads gridded data sets -- their structure and format, how to create them, and how to instruct grads to interpret them properly. Here are some quick links for skipping through this section: 

Basic Concept of Operation

grads commands are entered in the terminal window and the response from grads is either graphics in the graphics window or text in the terminal window. The three fundamental grads commands:

1. open    open or make available to grads a data file with either gridded or station data
2. d          display a GrADS "expression" (e.g., a slice of data)
3. set      manipulate the "what" "where" and "how" of data display

set baropts

set baropts opts

Description here..........opts can have the values of

outline     do not fill in the bar
filled       fill the bar

set bargap

set bargap val

Sets the gap between bars in percent. val should range from 0 to 100. The default is 0, or no gap. A value of 100 gives a single vertical line for each bar. 

set barbase

set barbase val|bottom|top

If val is given, each bar rises or falls from that value, assuming the value is within the plotting range. If bottom is specified, each bar rises from the bottom of the plot. If top is specified, each bar falls from the top of the plot.

set background

set background color#

Sets the background color to color#. 

basemap.gs

This is documentation for basemap.gs, a Grads script that overlays a land or ocean mask that exactly matches the coastal outlines of the three Grads map files: lowres, mres, and hires. Basemap works by overlaying polygons on top of an existing display; once they are all drawn, the polygons appear as a solid region that covers the land or ocean areas. Basemap does not actually mask the data, it only masks the display of the data.

Syntax

The land and ocean masks are composed of hundreds of polygons that are specified in accompanying ASCII files. The ASCII files must be downloaded from the Grads script library. Once you have downloaded these files and stored them in a convenient location, you must update your copy of basemap.gs to include the path of the location of these files. The script will not work without these files.