GeoCat - replaces NCAR Command Language (NCL)

Introduction  

This article introduces geocat  as a replacement on JASMIN for NCAR Command Language (NCL) which is now deprecated.

NCL now deprecated  

NCL is now deprecated by NCAR (see  this announcement  ), there is no Rocky 9 version available, so we will not be providing it when JASMIN moves from CentOS to using Rocky 9 in the next few months. The plan is to add to Jaspy the geocat-viz package, which is NCAR’s Python replacement for NCL.

Installation in a conda environment  

To give you a chance now to familiarise yourself with geocat-viz, here are some instructions for how you could install it in a Conda environment under your own home directory.

Total disk space required is 3.2GB.

Commands marked with #* below will be needed again in order to activate the environment in later sessions.

Deactivate jaspy in this session:

module unload jaspy     #*

Download miniforge installer:

wget <https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge/releases/latest/download/Miniforge3-Linux-x86_64.sh>

Install base environment:

bash Miniforge3-Linux-x86_64.sh

Accept the default answers to the questions, saying no to the question about conda init.

Activate the base environment:

source ~/miniforge3/bin/activate  #*

Create and activate an environment:

mamba create -n my-geocat-env
conda activate my-geocat-env    #*

Install the packages:

mamba install geocat-viz geocat-datafiles

Try one of the examples from:
https://geocat-examples.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gallery/index.html 

wget https://geocat-examples.readthedocs.io/en/latest/_downloads/efafc109e5344e8e33052ad5213ee4be/NCL_box_1.py
python NCL_box_1.py

(should display a plot)

Full documentation is at  https://geocat-viz.readthedocs.io/en/latest/