Introduction to SEOM Plotting Package.

The default plotting package that comes with SEOM relies on the NCAR graphics library for the basic drawing utilities. There are 3 basic programs:

drawcoast : Draws the SEOM grid along with map projections. It can display information about the grid such as the average grid spacing within each element and parallel partition information.
contours : Draw contour lines of a function defined either on a SEOM grid or on a structured (finite-difference-like) grid.
vectors : Draw velocity vectors on either SEOM grids or structured grids.

Running the programs

Most of these programs are driven by scripts that can be piped into the code, e.g.




 drawcoast < drawcoast.in

sample script files are located at the end of the drawcoast page, and can be modified at will. Each of the programs generates a gmeta file that can be viewed with idt, e.g. idt gmeta .

Downloading the code

The source code is available for download . The Makefile should be fairly easy to read. Note again that the visualization is built on top of the NCAR graphics package. The code is written in fortran 90 and the ncargf77 command should have an f90 counterpart. To build the executable you need to:


make drawcoast 

make contours 

make vectors

Environment variables

There are several environment variables that can/must be set before using the package:

XCOASTDATA: The default coastline is the one included in the NCAR graphics package. It is possible to use a different data set. Kate Hedstrom has written the code to read the coastline data base (the file is gzipped) available with her gridpak software. The environment variable XCOASTDATA points to this data base.
COLORBAR_FILE: is needed to control the display (vertical or horizontal), positioning, and labelling of color contours.