Reuven Shenkar

Hi Duncan, I also noticed that, and suspected that the recent Google Earth update is to blame. Personally I find the sync feature very useful, both for viewing objects and georeferencing backdrops. Viewing objects is very handy to verify that everything is in place. I use less frequently georeferencing of Google Earth backdrops for the purpose of digitization in the map editor, but still it is useful for e.g. doing small modifications of roughness lines. Reuven

madajavi, I will just add that you can also create any arbitrary shape using a GIS software and import it into the map editor (e.g. if you want a perfect circle, it would be rather difficult to digitize one by free hand directly in the map editor). You can download SAGA GIS or QGIS for that purpose - both are open-source and free. Simply export the created boundary line as a shape file (*.shp) or a *.dxf file and then import it into the map editor.

Hi all, and happy new year, I read with some excitement Brian's announcement on the WAsP homepage, referring to a forthcoming WAsP-CFD that is somewhere under way. It would be very interesting to know what is the expected timeline for this. I guess that it is not just right around the corner; hopefully I am wrong... Cheers, Reuven

Thanks, Niels. I have purchased Surfer 10 two weeks ago and indeed it is up to the task.

I hope I am not veering too much away from the forum's subject (I am talking about wind maps from WAsP after all). Lately I have been doing my own little search, looking for a mapping software that can produce publication quality wind maps (from the GRD files exported from WAsP). By high quality I mean - as much control as possible of every graphical aspect of the map. So far I have been using SAGA and QGIS. I found SAGA to be a wonderful tool that can do some sophisticated things with grids and shapes, but it is not a mapping software per se, and therefore lacks many features. Same goes for QGIS. In the last few days I have been trying Global Mapper (which seems quite outdated, and the mapping facility is not up to my requirements) and Surfer 10, which at the moment seems to be the closest to what I am looking for. I know that the cutting edge in GIS are the ESRI tools (ArcGIS family), but it seems that they are way out of what I can afford at the moment. Therefore, I would be happy to have some further opinions/recommendations and read about other user's experience.

@jfcorbett: Thanks for mentioning this option. For some reason I didn't think about it myself. It is possible to read KML into SAGA and QGIS (both open-source codes), let alone commercial GIS software. But I guess parsing the XML directly to MAP is the fastest. Now I only need to figure out how to write such a parser myself.