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MetCal (the “Meteorological Calculator”) is the GUI for the SPA as described in for more information about the archive. It is the interface that most new users of this package should become familiar with before they begin to work with the developer's interface (see Developers interface). The interface contains a notebook with three tabs, each of which is described in detail, See Metcal. The end-user simply has to define input and output files, along with the data type, and then request outputs from MetCal. The GUI, written in perl/Tk (a modular Tcl/Tk addon to basic perl), accesses a pre-compiled FORTRAN90 executable which handles the program flow at run-time. The result is a very simple interface for the user, who needs to know only basic information to access the computational routines of the SPA.