GIS Integration

Each PHYGROW subsystem interacts with 3 repositories (input, intemediate, and accumulated.) These repositories are built with the netCDF interface provided by Unidata at UCAR. An extension to the perl scripting language has been added to read and write data files built with netCDF. These extensions enable a user to develop a batch processing mode to build input files or map GUI data dumps input files, or to import or export the netcdf files to an arbitrary ASCII file. All of these repositories are gridded data sets with a LON/LAT coordinates, extended text descriptions of each variable, units for each variable, and where appropriate a min/max range for each variable. The ASCII file is the intermediate file format for use in export/import operations to various data visualization tools (e.g. spreadsheets, databases, gis, mathematical analysis programs.) This interface allows any of the data visualization/manipulation tools mentioned above to be used as an interface for input generation, or a model to generate intermediate results to feed into accumulated repositories to affect other model, or a plain result viewer. Phygrow ASCII export scripts create ArcInfo, GRASS, and Quatro Pro, importable ASCII files. Users are free to develop their own ASCII export scripts.