NCAR Command Language (NCL)

C2SM supports the usage of the excellent data processing
and visualization tool NCL.

From 30 August to 2 September 2010, three developers of NCL, Mary Haley, Dennis Shea and David Brown, paid Zurich a visit. In a workshop organized and sponsored by C2SM, they introduced more than 30 scientists to the secrets of data processing and visualization. Attendees included researchers from ETH Zurich, MeteoSwiss and University of Bern. The workshop was performed in a mixture of lectures and lab sessions with the possibility to work with own datasets.

NCL is a free interpreted language with a unique characteristic: It is developed specifically for the use in climate science. It has excellent support for netCDF, HDF and GRIB, and can read and write many further file formats. The visualizations are world class and highly customizable. The tool is actively developed and boasts a large and lively user and support community.

The usage of NCL is clearly on the rise throughout the climate community worldwide, but also within the C2SM community as attested by the number of researchers interested in the workshop. The C2SM staff would like to encourage the entire Center’s community to use NCL and is ready to facilitate the switch to NCL by assisting the translation of existing tools from another languages to NCL and by helping to implement missing features.

C2SM community scientists interested in using NCL are invited to contact us for assistance.