Greetings GEMPAK Community.
In March of 2021, the Unidata Program Center made the community aware that
it no longer had software development resources available to support the
continued use and evolution of GEMPAK. Following discussions with community
members, Unidata published A Proposal for Community Support of GEMPAK (
https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/blogs/news/entry/a-proposal-for-community-support),
laying out some history of the package and the support situation, and
proposing a way forward.
At that time, long-time GEMPAK user Daryl Herzmann of Iowa State University
offered to take the lead in coordinating community-based efforts to
continue making GEMPAK available. In the intervening months, Herzmann and
other community members have worked to identify ways to synthesize
Unidata's existing GEMPAK codebase with updated code from the National
Weather Service (NWS). Although the NWS remains committed to moving all
operational forecasting activities to use the Advanced Weather Interactive
Processing System (AWIPS), developers at the National Centers for
Environmental Prediction (NCEP) continue to make changes to the NAWIPS
package, as GEMPAK is known in the NWS.
Recently, Herzmann made GEMPAK version 7.14.0 available, bringing the
package in line with the latest updates to NAWIPS. That version is
available from the GEMPAK repository on Github (
https://github.com/Unidata/gempak/releases/tag/7.14.0).
To summarize the current situation:
- GEMPAK is no longer being actively maintained or supported by the
Unidata Program Center.
- GEMPAK distributions created and maintained by community members are
available from the GEMPAK Github repository (
https://github.com/Unidata/gempak), hosted by Unidata.
- Unidata will continue to host and maintain the gembud mailing list as
a service to community users of GEMPAK:
- list archives:
https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/mailing_lists/archives/gembud/
- subscribe: gembud-join@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- GEMPAK downloads can be accessed at:
https://github.com/Unidata/gempak/releases
- Community members who wish to contribute development or other efforts
to the GEMPAK project should visit https://github.com/Unidata/gempak.
GEMPAK Downloads from Unidata Discontinued
------------------------------------------------------------
Unidata has been hosting downloads of compiled GEMPAK binaries for version
7.5.1 — released in February 2019. This was the last version we had
development resources available to create. While using the most recent
version (7.14.0) does require the user to build the package from source
code, Unidata now feels that the binary version we have available is too
old to continue distributing. GEMPAK version 7.5.1 binaries have been
removed from Unidata's download server.
Note that version 7.5.1 documentation continues to be available on
Unidata's documentation server: GEMPAK Documentation (
https://docs.unidata.ucar.edu/gempak/). While Unidata has no plans to
update this documentation set, it remains useful.
Regards,
Unidata
