Version 6.6 Release Notes

New Features and Bug Fixes in Version 6.6

Bug fixes

The bug fixes in V6.6 are listed in the Version 6.5 release notes.

NOTE: A serious bug has been found in this version of Ferret which affects computing the definite integral. Zonal integrals return results that are too small by a factor of pi/180 (0.01745). This bug first appeared in Ferret v6.42 and was fixed in version 6.67. Installations of LAS which run these versions of Ferret are unaffected by this bug.

System Issues

  • The 32-bit linux executable is built on Linux Red-Hat 5. It willnot run on Red-Hat 3. This is RedHat's policy not to support RH5libraries on earlier releases of the operating system.
  • Beginning with version 6.6, Ferret is built using gfortran and gcc. You will need to installthe external functions that are part of the release, and if you haveyour own external functions, you will need to re-build them usinggfortran.
  • Also because of the change in compiler, you need to be sure to install the environment files. (For some releases it's sufficient to replace the executable only, but not this time.) The fonts files have changed for the 32-bit Ferret executable.
  • The -gui option, which has been unsupported for many years, is no longer available starting with Ferret v6.6. The -gui command-line switch for starting Ferret has no effect; Ferret will start in its standard command-line mode.

New Features

  • Ferret Version 6.6 is identical to Version 6.5 except that it is linked with NetCDF-4 libraries (from https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/) instead of OPeNDAP libraries (from opendap.org), and V6.6 has new qualifiers on commands to allow handling NetCDF-4 files. Future releases of Ferret will all be linked with NetCDF libraries.
  • NetCDF-4 provides classic NetCDF dataset access, OPeNDAP capabilities for access to remote datasets, and the ability to read and write NetCDF-4 formatted files for HDF-5 compression and chunking. See the documentation pages, and the "NetCDF News and Announcements" section on Unidata's NetCDF page, https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf// for links to articles about netCDF and HDF-5 files.
  • Ferret V6.6 reads NetCDF-4 files transparently, with no new command syntax needed. It has new syntax to request compression and chunking and to control the settings for writing NetCDF-4 files.
  • Documentation for NetCDF-4 dataset access can be found in Chapter 2 of the Ferret Users Guide, in the section on NetCDF data.
  • Because it is linked with HDF-5 libraries, Ferret v6.6 no longer writes HDF-4 "movies". See the Ferret documentation for methods to make animations from sets of gif images.