other than GrADS and NCL, any other map/chart scripting and plotting software dedicated for climate and meteorology?

Question

NCL is quite good indeed, but I would like to know whether there are other options.

Answer 1

Why restrict yourself to dedicated software? In my experience you quickly outgrow dedicated software and find yourself wanting to do something that only general purpose software, with a flexible system, can do.

Often dedicated software is only used because its the convention, or because only it can read the file formats.

If you want real flexibility you need a first-class programming language with a top-notch graphics capability, and that would mean looking at Python or R - both have packages for reading spatial data, and great plotting functions.