Grib2V5d

The program grib2v5d converts the content of a GRIB file (a format used for exchanging meteorological model fields) into a file that can be viewed with Vis5d, a popular program for 3-D visualisation of meteorological fields. The vertical level types supported on input are sigma, eta (Mesinger), (some kind of) hybrid sigma/pressure, height and pressure. The fields can be interpolated, on output, at height levels (interpolation to pressure levels may be added in the future), or can be kept at the same levels as in input (this is especially useful for viewing data at model levels without the filter of interpolation). The horizontal grid should be regular lon/lat, either rotated or not; no horizontal interpolation is made since Vis5d supports directly this type of grid. The program is mainly written in fortran 90 and is derived from a previous version made by Paolo Patruno; it makes use of a Fortran77 library for managing access to grib files, a C library for reading and decoding grib and a C subroutine (modified from the one provided with Vis5d) for writing topography files. The program has been developed at ARPA-SIM (Regional hydro-meteorological service of Emilia Romagna, Italy) in the framework of the COSMO (Consortium for Small scale MOdelling) project which includes, among its participants, German, Greek, Italian, Polish and Swiss meteorological Services.

New!

I have released readglobe, a converter for topographic data from the global 1 Km elevation dataset Globe (available at NOAA) to the Vis5d topography format. You can download the sources at sourceforge.

On-line Documentation

The documentation for Grib2v5d (almost completely up-to-date) in html format is available on this site

Download

You can download Grib2v5d at sourceforge.
Remember also to download the required packages grib_util and picogrib.

Future improvements

Automatic creation of a namelist from a given grib file. Support for stereographic grids. Support for different vertical coordinates. Possibility to display model topography instead of Vis5d internal topography (already done but not working). More precompiled packages.
Comments are expected about which of these improvements can be useless/interesting/useful/prioritary etc; other proposals, as well as help, are welcome, of course.

Screenshots

Since Grib2v5d is mainly a command-line text-based utility I suggest you to look at Vis5d screenshots which are much more interesting, or just enjoy these orographic clouds over Monte Rosa, behind Castor and Pollux (Alps).

Enjoy your gribs on Vis5d!