I would wait and see what happens before making your final decision. If national support for GEMPAK does go away, it would only be after it's capabilities have been integrated in to AWIPS2. My understanding is that AWIPS2 will be non-proprietary so that the private and academic sectors will be able to use the software and contribute to the knowledge base. If the National Centers are being brought on board, hopefully AWIPS2 will be better for viewing weather data on a global scale.
Mark Keehn
NWS Houston, TX
McIDAS would be the way we would move if something did happen to GEMPAK. It's
ability to deal with model data is not anywhere nearly as good, but the new
MySQL database storage of GRIB data does make it faster, and text products via
the wxtlist, tafrpt, sclist, sfcrpt has always been pretty good...and of course
satellite is still it's strong suit. We are heavy users of it right now for
certain things.
That being said if I ever get a new machine with 4GB of RAM ee will install IDV
on it since it runs on Solaris x86/x64 now. I have already played around with
it quite a bit on my personal laptop.
