 Brief description of the NCEP GRIB software package

 This tar file contains source, makefiles, and documentation
 for libraries and utilities that run on an HP workstation.
 The purpose of this software package is to help manipulate gridded data
 that are packed in the international GRIB (GRIdded Binary) format.
 This software should be considered officially unsupported off the NCEP 
 operational CRAY computers.  The date of this release is October, 1996.

 This software package may not be completely portable to other platforms.
 In particular, the code makes use of so-called automatic arrays
 which are dynamically allocated arrays within subroutines.  Both
 the CRAY and HP compilers recognize automatic arrays as an extension
 to FORTRAN 77.  (Automatic arrays are standard in Fortran 90.)
 Furthermore, the byte-addressable I/O package is machine specific.
 The subprograms involved are BAOPEN, BAOPENR, BAREAD, and BAWRITE.
 There is a version of this package included in this tar file that
 makes use of ANSI standard FORTRAN direct-access I/O.  Using this
 version of the package, however, is likely to make the programs
 run several times slower than if an optimized version is installed.
 
 This tar file contains five directories (w3lib, gblib, iplib, splib, utils).
 The directory w3lib contains many standard w3lib entries related to GRIB.
 The directory gblib contains GETGB and associated GRIB-accessing routines.
 The directories iplib and splib contain the general interpolation and spectral
 transform libraries, respectively.  Documentation of iplib and splib can be
 found within the respective directories.  The directory utils contain four
 utilities, grbindex, copygb, anomgb, and diffgb, that use these libraries.
 Grbindex creates a GRIB "index" file from a GRIB file.  The GRIB index file
 acts as a table of contents for the GRIB file, making its access faster.
 The procedure to run grbindex is simply: grbindex gribfile indexfile.
 Copygb, anomgb, and diffgb respectively copy, compute anomalies, and compare
 GRIB files.  Their "manpages" can be found in the directory.

 Happy GRIBbing!


