PUFF is designed to run on a UNIX (or Unix-like :) operating system. It is written in C++ and requires UCAR's netcdf libraries. Both input and output of puff are in binary netcdf format. Puff has been compiled to run on HPUX 9.05 and 10.20, IRIX 6.x, Sun Solaris 2.6 and Linux Kernel 2.x systems using both GNU g++ compiler and native compilers.

There exists a GUI version, puffgui, which is a wrapper to the standard command-line version. This requires extensive third-party, public-domain software to run. The interface is written in Tcl/Tk 8.0 with the Tix 4.1 and BLT 2.4 extensions. Mapping of output is done with Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) 3.x. The ImageMagick 4+ convert utility is used with ghostscript gs to convert GMT's postscript output to gif format.

Credits

PUFF was developed as part of my Doctorate thesis at the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska, Fairbanks. The model was initially conceived by Dr. Hiroshi Tanaka, then at the GI/UAF. Many thanks to my advisors, Ken Dean and William Stringer. PUFF was funded in part by the Geophysical Institute with some additional funds contributed through a COMET (Cooperative Program for Operational Meteorology, Education and Training) project in cooperation with the National Weather Service, Alaska Region.

About this Site

The graphics for this site have been created using numerous Unix/Linux programs, all freely available. I've used GMT (Generic Mapping Tools) for the ash plots. These are some of the best set of mapping tools available.

Graphics manipulation has been done using ImageMagick tools and Gimp. The globe animation was rendered with xplanet with final composites created in Gimp.