Vis > quickstart > Quick Start Guide
Quick Start Guide
Preparation
This guide contains information about a wide variety of packages you can use to view data. Of course, you can't expect all the packages out there to read your data format - you'll first have to put it into a common format that they can all read. Hence, the requirement that you store your data in netCDF - there are few formats that are so widely supported for scientific visualization. So, accept this as a necessary first step. Fortunately, there are many helpful utilites to help you with this. And you'll have the none-too-insignificant side benefit of having completely self-documented data files!
Visualization
Now, how do you view your data? Here's an abbreviated list of packages which are (arguably) the most useful for the creation of basic displays, listed in order of their feature-richness (and complexity):
- ncview
- simple, fast 2-D color-fill plots, animation, simple maps, no vectors, minimal annotation; GUI .
- Freud
- NCAR-like 2-D plots: contoured fields, shading, geography, vectors; customize via GUI
- LinkWinds
- fast 2-D plots, simultaneous slices, geography, some 3-D and projections, no vectors; GUI
- Ferret
- 2-D contours/shading, vectors, geography, ocean DB's; excellent math functions; new GUI
- NCAR Graphics
- the old standard (contours, shading, vectors, geography) at the subroutine level
- significant limitations in the command language (NCL) and GUI till > V4.0
- Iris Explorer
- powerful, polished 2- and 3-D plots; user-driven data-flow; incorporation of user-functions
For more information on using these (and on their pluses and minuses), see the desriptions below. Try them out on some sample data (GFDL only: see /net/jps/netcdf/sample/*) . For better disk response (yours and mine :-), please copy the files to your local disk.