All MMM-developed source code is free, but copyrighted and UCAR is the copyright holder. These software packages use utilities that are within the NCAR Graphics package.
Several options are available for manipulating the data algebraically and displaying it.
Data from PPI scans can be interpolated to Cartesian or longitude-latitude grids, either at constant height or constant elevation angle surfaces. An alternative is the netCDF which is highly portable, and there are existing software packages that can directly read this format. The pure binary format can also be used in your own programs, but it would be harder to do. Input and output to netCDF files is slower and the files are bigger, so it is not recommended for general, everyday use on the same platform type. Furthermore, only one volume can be written to netCDF files.