FERRET

Contents

• Introduction
• Setting Up Your Environment
• Getting Started
• More Information

Introduction

FERRET is an interactive visualization and analysis environment designed to meet the needs of oceanographers and meteorologists analyzing large, complex gridded data sets. FERRET can be used to analyze multi-gigabyte data sets containing mixed 3 and 4-dimensional variables on staggered grids.

Additional features of FERRET include:

• Mathematica-like flexibility
• geophysical formatting
• calculations can be applied over arbitrary regions
• memory management for large calculations
• symmetrical processing in four data dimensions
• extensive documentation and mailing list support

Setting Up Your Environment

FERRET is available on all ARSC Linux workstations and HPC systems.

Several environment variables are required for FERRET to run properly. The ferret module needs to be loaded to ensure all environment variables are set correctly. To load the default ferret module, and then run FERRET, use the following commands:

       host% module load ferret

If you plan to use a non-default version, you will need to specify the version you wish to use. Available versions can be found with:

       host% module avail ferret

Getting Started

FERRET can be launched by running the following command from the prompt:

       host% ferret

Once FERRET is running, commands can be issued on the terminal, or as scripts. An examples follow.

Plot the values of x*x for 1 through 100 (yes? is the ferret prompt):

       yes? PLOT/x=1:100 x*x

An introductory tutorial is available by executing the command GO tutorial at the ferret command prompt, as follows:

       yes? GO tutorial

The online tutorials for FERRET can be found at http://ferret.pmel.noaa.gov/FERRET_17sep07/Documentation/ferret_tour.html

More Information

• Online Help: Text and Postscript documentation files are available in the directory: /usr/local/pkg/ferret/current/doc
• WWW Site: FERRET web site, http://ferret.wrc.noaa.gov/Ferret, has extensive documentation, a FAQ list, and additional links.
• FERRET Mailing List: Send mail to with 'subscribe ferret_users' as the first line in the message body.
• Contact: User Support

• Developer Information

  Thermal Modeling and Analysis Project
  Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory
  NOAA
  7600 Sand Point Way NE
  Seattle, WA 98115
  E-mail:
  WWW: http://ferret.wrc.noaa.gov/Ferret
  

Arctic Region Supercomputing Center
PO Box 756020, Fairbanks, AK 99775 | voice: 907-450-8600 | email:

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