IMPORTANT NOTE
The CPDN Classic experiment is now obsolete and these pages are retained for historical purposes only. We strongly recommend the use of BOINC instead of the materials presented here, which are unsupported.
This advanced visualisation software has been
developed by Andy Heaps at the University of Reading, and uses IDL. It
has been developed with the Open University short course and school teaching
in mind, and allows participants to see a lot more of how their model
worlds have developed.
It unfortunately will only run on the Windows NT 4.0, 2000 and XP platforms.
You must be running, or have run, a climateprediction.net model to be able to use the package
and, when you install it, you must have administrative rights for your computer.
The software can be downloaded here.
It is a 20Mbyte download and should be saved to your C:\Program Files\Climate
Prediction directory. Double click on the file and follow the instructions in the installation window.
Double click on the 'SVI' (Student Visualisation Interface) icon that has appeared on your desktop to launch
the visualisation package.
Note that the visualisation window is 1020x700 when started up - we recommend
a screen resolution of 1024x768 or 1280x1024, although some people do
seem to have managed to get it to work with 800x600.
CPView
If your machine cannot run the advanced visualisation package, an alternative has been created
by participant
MartinSykes31. This will also let you view the data produced by your CPDN experiments in more detail
. Follow
this link to
Martin's website, and go to his CPView page to find out about and download the software.
Please note - this software is not supported by climate
prediction.net!
Users Guide
Here is a brief introduction to using the advanced visualisation package.
When you first open the package (by double clicking on SVI on your desktop), the default field plotted is the surface
temperature field of your current model run in 'timestep' mode. This updates
as your run progresses.
It should look like:
After making any change, click on the 'plot' button on the bottom right
of the screen to update the plot.
The View button (top left) lets you change the type
of plot which is produced:
Surface Fields there are 4 menus available:
General
-Timescale: timestep updates the field as your model runs,
season lets you select one or more season in one or more year - so
you could plot the average December/ January/ February surface temparature
for 1810-1820 (use control left click to select multiple years) and year
lets you plot the average surface temperature over one or more year.
Note that, to be able to view fields in season or year
mode, you need to have completed at least one phase of the experiment,
and you can only view fields from completed phases of the experiment (this
is because of the data processing that happens at the end of each phase).
-Field: Surface temperature, (surface) pressure, total
precipitation (rain & snow), rainfall, snowfall,
Top Of Atmosphere infrared brightness temperature (a measure
of how much heat the Earth is losing to space), total cloud amount
and plot memory (used in conjuction with the memory button on
the top left of the screen).
-Plot Type: allows you to select whether you see the plot in colour or
black and white etc.
Projection
This may be either cylindrical
or satellite. If you choose to view a cylindrical projection,
you can control the boundaries of the plot, either by specifying them
explicitly, or by left clicking on the plot itself to zoom in. If you
choose to view a satellite projection, you can control which
bit of the Earth the satellite is hovering over.
My Scale
This menu allows you to choose an appropriate contour scale for your
plot - so if your world is particularly warm, you can extend the colour
scale upwards (the extend scale options add one more colour to
the end of the scale, for more drastic changes you have to specify a complete
new scale).
Overlay
This menu allows you to overlay (with line contours) one field over another
- so you could overlay pressure onto surface temperature, or precipitation
onto cloud, to get a feel for how these fields interrelate. You can also
overlay wind vectors (not on timestep fields) which are arrows
showing the direction and strength of the wind. Vector skip controls
how many vectors are plotted ( e.g. if vector skip=1, vectors are plotted
at every other grid point) and vector length allows you to control
the scale of the vectors.
Zonal Fields
These are fields which have been averaged in longitude i.e. you make
the Earth 2-Dimensional by averaging all the values on each latitude circle
- so you can see how the fields change with height. The main new option
here is that you can chose whether the height scale is linear in height
(as it is in the real world, with pressure dropping off exponentially
with distance from the Earth's surface) or pressure (related
to the mass of air), which lets you see what most of the air molecules
in the atmosphere are doing.
Time height Fields
This lets you see how the vertical structure of the atmosphere varies
with time at a given latitude (again is has been averaged in longitude).
No new options here.
Surface Average Fields
These are fields which have been averaged both in longitude and latitude.
You can either plot these in timestep mode, in which case you
see the fields evolving over 1/ 2/ 7 days in the model you have running
currently. In year mode, you can see the results for all the
completed phases of the experiment. The default is to plot global
mean data, but you can deselect this and instead choose to plot the
evolution of the field at a given latitude and longitude. Long degs
and Lat degs allow you to specify the size of the box you are
looking at - so a 1° by 1° box centred on 52° N, 0°W would
approximately cover London. You can choose to plot 2 fields simultaneously
(field 2 appears with a dashed line). The my scale menu
allows you to choose an appropriate y axis for the plot (look at the numbers
appearing in the box on the bottom of the window to see what scale is
appropriate). If you choose to set a scale for one of the fields, you
have to set a scale for the other too. N.B. If you decide
half way through plotting a timestep mode surface average field that its
taking too long and you want to plot something else instead, you must
press 'Stop' or the package will keep reverting to that
field until it has finished.
The memory button allows you to save a season/ year
surface field which you have plotted into memory. If you then create
another season/ year surface field, you can use the memory
menu options to add or difference (subtract) the new
field from the old one. Using the field menu in the general
menu, you can then plot memory. So, for example, you could
plot 1825-1840 year mean surface temperature, add the field to memory,
then plot 2050-2065 year mean surface temperature, difference from memory,
and then plot memory to see how average surface temperatures changed when
carbon dioxide was doubled.
The file menu gives the following options:
Change Experiment: If you have already completed one
or more climateprediction.net experiments, this option allows
you to select
which set of results you look at. N.B. timestep fields will always show
the experiment which is running currently.
Print: This will print the current figure (including
scale bar and logos).
Save as an image: This will let you save the current
plot as a .pgn, .jpg or .bmp image. These will be saved in the C:/Program
Files/ Climate Prediction/vis directory. You can choose to reverse the
colours of the figure to save on black ink. You can also choose to autosave
every image you create.
Output date: This will output the data used to produce
the last figure to a file which you specify - very useful if you want
to import it into, e.g. Excel and do further analysis. You can choose
to autosave all the data you produce.
Known bugs
Here is a list of bugs in the visualisation package which we know about:
- The visualistion cannot access archived 4th phase fields. This is because
it was designed with the Open University in mind, and their short course
is based on the 3 phase standard experiment. Hopefully, in time, the package
will be made more general.
- If, when you double click on the 'GLOBAL' icon, the interface is launched but then won't plot anything
(with no error messages) it is probably because you installed the package on a Windows XP machine
without administrative rights. Reinstall it with administrative rights.
- Some people have found that they get an error message saying that the package can't find MSVCR70.dll. If you get
that, please download the file here and put it in your
C:\WINNT\system32 (or C:\WINDOWS\system32) folder.
- The package assumes that your archived data is in C:/ Program Files/
Climate Prediction/archive. This is the default.
- You always have to plot a surface field first - if you have the model
running then this happens automatically, as the default is for timestep
surface temperature to plot. However, if you dont have the model running,
you have to plot a year/season surface field before you can plot any of
the other views.
- Images won't save as .bmp, and sometimes .jpg is temperamental..
Make 3D globes out of your model results!
If you have successfully downloaded the visualisation software, and have Adobe Photoshop on your PC, you can download this
software here.
Flexify turns a equi-rectangular jpeg into an icosahedral net, which you can print off, fold and glue to make a
3D souvenir of your modelled world.
Instructions for use:
- Use the advanced visualisation software (SVI) to create an image of a surface field (e.g. temperature).
- Save the image as a jpg
- Unzip icosahedron-model.zip and double click on Icosahedron Model.8bf. This will launch Photoshop.
- Open the jpg in Photoshop (from C:/ Program Files/ Climate Prediction/ vis)
- Select 'flaming pear' from the filter menu.
This sample of flexify, which is a photoshop plugin, was kindly supplied by Flaming Pear.
To find out about the other things you can do with flexify, or the other Flaming Pear products, visit their website.
