The PCMDI visualization and computation system (VCS): A workbench for climate data display and analysis

Description/Abstract

This software was developed by the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. It was designed to provide some of the basic capabilities needed for validating, comparing, and diagnosing climate model behavior. It can be controlled either interactively, or from a script file, or control can alternate between these modes during a session. A script can be saved during an interactive session and merely replayed, or it can be edited and replayed. The state-of-the-system can be dumped, as a script, at any instant, and that script can be used later to restore that instant of the session. Attributes for data can describe variables existing in a file or variables to be computed as a function of previously selected variables. The dimensions of variables can be subset, reversed, transposed, wrapped-around, and thinned by selecting either a stride of nodes or by randomly selecting individual nodes. Grid transformations are supported by allowing a different set of dimension vectors to be specified in the dimension descriptors. A display page can be output as either Adobe PostScript for hardcopy, or as a raster image for hardcopy or animation.