We make grids with a package called gridpak. The heart of this package is a program which creates an orthogonal grid when provided with the boundary information. The other programs in gridpak are support for this program and do such things as aid in the defining of the grid boundary or finding the bathymetry on the finished grid. An example grid with the ETOPO5 bathymetry for Barrow Canyon north of Alaska is shown in the figure.

This figure was created using NCAR graphics. We have always used NCAR graphics to visualize our grids and the related fields. If you do not have it, you will have to find another way to do the map projections and the visualization. If you do come up with a completely open source solution, please let us know and we will provide that as an option.

A new, improved matlab version of this software is available from Chuck Denham.

gridpak5.3.tar.gz

The latest version of gridpak which reads and writes netCDF files, including the netCDF version of etopo5. It requires netCDF version 3.4. This version works with SCRUM 3.0 and SPEM 5.2 and it no longer requires spemlib.

gridpak4.tar.Z

A previous version of gridpak which works with SPEM 5.1 and earlier.

grid_manual.ps.gz

The draft documentation for the latest version of gridpak.

spemlib.tar.Z

A compressed tar file of the library needed by SPEM and by old gridpak.

etopo5

The ETOPO5 global bathymetry/topography data. It is an 18 megabyte IEEE binary file.

etopo5.nc

The ETOPO5 global bathymetry/topography data. It is an 18 megabyte netCDF file.

img2nc.tar.gz

The software to extract a portion of the Smith and Sandwell topography and to write it to a netCDF file for use with gridpak. You will also need their 134 MB topography file.

xcoast3.tar.gz

An X11 application for drawing grid boundaries on top of the coastlines. It is based on xfig.

world_int.cst.gz

The fine resolution coastlines for xcoast.

maskedge.tar.gz

A C++ application for finding the input to the mask program from the bathymetry on a grid. This version requires STL from the C++ standard library and works with g++ 3.3.1 or newer.

xpots.tar

An X11 application for use with the grid program. It allows you to control the gridspacing along the boundaries.