The simplest way to analyze and interpret climate model output is to display it. The Analyze Output feature of EdGCM converts the GCM data into common file formats, such as tab-delimited text and netCDF, that are used by spreadsheet and imaging programs.
The EdGCM suite offers a specially designed companion program called EVA (EdGCM Visualization Application) as the first option in the display and graphical analysis of model output. The engine that drives EVA is IDL, a powerful visualization tool commonly used in the scientific community.
Depending on the type of data available, EVA can be used to display and analyze data in a variety of ways:
EVA supports many map projections, colorbars, and overlays that may be further customized as needed.
Since the files for time series, altitude-latitude data sets and summary tables are formatted as tab-delimited text, the data within them can be viewed and plotted with any spreadsheet program (such as Microsoft Excel) available to the user.
Panoply is a data imaging program written by Robert Schmunk at NASA/GISS and was EdGCM’s original scientific visualization software. Panoply has evolved into much more than a mapping program for education. It can read complex, very large, netCDF data sets and is capable of producing nearly 100 unique map projections. Users may continue to use Panoply with post-processed files generated by EdGCM if they wish, especially if comparison of EdGCM output to other model’s output or to observations is of interest.
Panoply plots geo-gridded arrays from netCDF 3 and 4, HDF 4 and 5, and GRIB 1 and 2 data sets. You can: