As mentioned in the previous blog post, I used the freely available GFS raw data from NCAR, stored in GRIB2 format, for plotting. NCAR also provides a own plotting language called NCL, which stands for NCAR Command Language. It’s a very useful tool to create both simple and very complex plots of meteorological data. It supports different data formats as e.g. GRIB2 and NetCDF to just mention the most common.
An alternative plotting tool that is commonly used to plot meteorogical data fields is GraDS.
In this post I want to share a simple plotting sample script for plotting a GFS T2m temperature field.
A wide variety of examples can be found at the official NCL page. But unfortunately there are no examples for GFS. So I hope this example can give you a good starting point.