The Grid Analysis and Display System (GrADS) is an interactive desktop tool that is used for easy access, manipulation, and visualization of earth science data.
Load a grads module and then type grads.
I failed to build 2.2.1 on focal as most of the libraries are too new (including hdf5, libpng, etc).
So instead, download the binaries from upstream and the supplemental libraries, extract them and for them to end up in (and respectively under) /usr/local/cas/grads/2.2.1. This way, we must make sure the module sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH so that the supplemental libraries can be found.
Even after all that, the SSL versions failed to run (missing libssh2.so.1), so I chose to download instead the noSSL variant which thankfully did work.
Extract also the example.tar.gz (separate download from upstream) into its own subfolder, and data2.tar.gz (ditto). You also need to provide a data/udpt file.
Any machine that wants to run grads must have libsm-dev:i386 installed.
Building (failed)
apt-get install libgd-dev libcairo2-dev libshp-dev libgeotiff-dev libgrib2c-dev libgadap-dev libpng-dev libxmu-headers time ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/cas/grads/2.2.1 --with-netcdf=/usr/local/shared/ubuntu-20.04/x86_64/netcdf/gnu/4.8.1/ --with-netcdf-include=/usr/local/shared/ubuntu-20.04/x86_64/netcdf/gnu/4.8.1/include --with-netcdf-libdir=/usr/local/shared/ubuntu-20.04/x86_64/netcdf/gnu/4.8.1/lib/ --with-gadap # takes <30 seconds time make # fails fairly fast
