netCDF to color GEOTIFF

[Alaric S. Haag]

Hello all, (my first post...)

I have been working with mapserver and the FWTools package, etc, for a few
weeks. I hope this question isn't too far off the mapserver-sepcific realm.
And please forgive the length of the post, just trying to be thorough.

Short question: How are people generating COLOR GeoTIFFs?

My goal is to render satellite images (spec. sea-surface temps) as a raster
layer IN COLOR. I can get the data to a netCDF, or even HDF. With
"gdal_translate" I can get a grayscale GeoTIFF that mapserver displays fine.
Ideally, I'd like to render essentially with a "value palette" (ala GMT .cpt
files), that is, render value (ranges) with assigned color (ranges). I'm
imagining others need similar capabilities, so I'm hoping someone can point
me in the right direction.

I thought I was getting close by pulling the GeoTIFF into OpenEV and
"reclassifying" and exporting, but the result seems to be an 32-bit RGBA
that mapserver can't (?) display. I have "mogrify'd" that down to 256
colors, but get grayscale back ("ColorInterp=Gray" is there a way to change
that?)

A few caveats:
 - I'd like to avoid "commercial" solns like ERDAS, or Arc...
 - I'd love a command-line solution that I can "cron"...

Am I just looking at a GDAL library coding project?

Thanks for any feedback!
Alaric