Hub-height wind speeds from WRF and GFS

I need to extract wind speed from an atmospheric model at 80m above ground level. That should be pretty simple right? There must be a tool which does that already? Anywhere?

Atmospheric models generally don't like height above ground as vertical coordinate. Most human beings do. This makes getting variables at specified heights a bit of a mission. Especially if the files are in GRIB format, which is a pain in itself.

One option I've have found for WRF is the Universal Post Processor, UPP. UPP will interpolate variables onto a fixed set of heights above sea level, flight levels. These are hard-coded into UPP at: 30m, 50m, 80m, 100m, 305 and a bunch of other heights up to 6000m.

A (not-documented) feature of UPP is that if you specify the vertical levels with a '2', they are interpolated to heights above ground level. Or at least above the level of the model terrain. So put

L = (22220, 0000 ....)

into you wrf_cntrl.parm file, you will get variables out at 30m, 50m, 80m and 100m, above terrain level. Additionally, if you dig into the UPP source code and edit:

src/unipost/MISCLN.f

Then you change the heights to be whatever you want. I settled on every 10m up to 120m. However, a quick check in
src/unipost/FDLVL.f reveals the interpolation is done linearly in height from the levels above and below the height you are interested in. OK if your model levels are close together. However, linearly interpolating wind speed from 150m to 80m is a bit questionable. Don't expect any magic to recreate the vertical wind speed profile.

It would be nice if UPP at least had the option to interpolate in log h. I looked at changing the source code to do this, but then backed away. It didn't look too difficult, I'm just lazy.

Oh - and UPP produces GRIB output. This is fine for me as I need GRIB format for input into the MET tool. But for most uses, GRIB is pretty painful to work with. I mean, fancy taking your lovely NetCDF files and giving you back GRIB. It's just not a deal.

GFS output proved even more of a challenge. UPP can apparently can work directly with GFS data, but there is no documentation on it. I tried it, and it attempted to read GFS files using an i/o module designed to import WRF data, so it fell over and died.

Next I tried using CDO. But I was unable to work with GFS output, as CDO seemed to think there was more than one timestep in my GRIB files (there wasn't).

The only tool left is NCL, which can't write GRIB output. I have implemented some code to which interpolate wind speeds to heights above ground level. My options now are to write that to NetCDF format, and then try and convert to GRIB so that I can input it into MET.

Surely there must be an easier way.