Student visualisation package

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.

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 climateprediction.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.