Could not find file [GSHHG high resolution shorelines]

Q&A
1

Hi there

I have been using GMT to plot some nice maps of Iran (-R43/64/25/40.5) with GNSS and other velocities using pscoast.

I tried to shrink the region and so zoom in on one area (-R49/56/27/34) but when I did this I got the error:

coast [ERROR]: 2. GSHHG: Did not find /usr/share/gshhg-gmt-nc4/binned_GSHHS_h.cdf nor the older *.cdf version
coast [WARNING]: GSHHG version 2.2.0 or newer is needed to use coastlines with GMT.
Get and install GSHHG from ftp://ftp.soest.hawaii.edu/gshhg/.
coast [ERROR]: Could not find file [GSHHG high resolution shorelines]
coast [ERROR]: 2. GSHHG: Did not find /usr/share/gshhg-gmt-nc4/binned_border_h.cdf nor the older *.cdf version
coast [ERROR]: Could not find file [GSHHG high resolution political boundaries]
coast [ERROR]: No GSHHG databases available - must abort

However when the region was larger I did not get these errors.
How do I install the necessary packages/data to get around this problem?

Everything else in the plot is exactly the same.

Thanks,
Jessica

2

Odd. Could you tell us what GMT version and operating system you have, please?

3

I am using GMT 6.1.0 on RHEL 8

4

Not sure what’s causing the issue with the gshhg files that you have, but you could try downloading the latest release of gshhg from https://github.com/GenericMappingTools/gshhg-gmt/releases and using gmt set DIR_GSHHG <path-to-files> to specify the location of the unzipped files.

5

Thanks for this! In my /usr/share/gshhg-gmt-nc4/ I only had:

binned_border_c.nc binned_border_i.nc binned_border_l.nc binned_GSHHS_c.nc binned_GSHHS_i.nc binned_GSHHS_l.nc binned_river_c.nc binned_river_i.nc binned_river_l.nc

and none of the *h.nc or *f.nc files.

I copied the unzipped *h.nc and *f.nc files from https://github.com/GenericMappingTools/gshhg-gmt/releases to my /usr/share/gshhg-gmt-nc4/ directory and I no longer have the coast error!

Thanks so much