[GRASS-user] Grass/GMT problem

[Roger Mason]

Hello,

I'm using the following to generate fake landscapes to be contoured in
GMT:

    r.surf.fractal out="landscape"
    r.rescale input="landscape" output="rescaled" to=0.0,30.1 --o
    r.neighbors input="rescaled" output="smoothed" size=25 --o
    r.out.bin -h input=smoothed output=gmt.grd --o

I set up gmt as follows:

  psbasemap -JX10 -R0/100/0/100 -P -B -K -U"Contour Map" > map.ps

and invoke gmt's contour command thus:

    grdcontour gmt.grd=bf -D -M -J -C5 -A5 -Gd3c -Wa2ta -O -K >> map.ps

The problem is that the produced "map" consists of very small, closed
loops that bear no resemblance to the landscape.  You may ask how I
know what the landscape should look like.  If I export the raster as
integer values, and import into into GMT using 'grdcontour gmt.grd=bf'
then everything is fine.  I have tried r.out.gdal with the GMT and
netCDF types but the resulting files could not be read by grdcontour.

At the moment I don't know how to determine whether it is Grass, GMT
or my ineptitude that is the problem.

Thanks for any help.

Roger

Grass 6.3.0
GMT 4.1.1
Gentoo Linux