The NCAR Command Language (NCL) is the coolest graphics tool I’ve ever seen. NCL has robust file input and output. It can read and write netCDF-3, netCDF-4 classic, netCDF-4, HDF4, binary, and ASCII data. It can read HDF-EOS2, HDF-EOS5, GRIB1, GRIB2, and OGR files. Though I don’t know most of the format above, but I saw its perfect plot on other one’s paper, so I decide to install it on my Macbook with Mac OS X 10.9.4.

Please look into this site and finish reading it before starting to step into the door.

Official site

I preferred to run the pre-compiled version, so the only problem after I installed according to the official guideline is the version of my GCC. Then I need to update GCC on my Mac, since I already have homebrew installed, brew install gcc48 will install the new version by itself. It takes about 30 minutes to compile from the source. Be patient!

The most complex work is setting some environmental variables, nothing special, just type what are recommended by the guideline. You won’t miss it.