Panel Plots

panel_1.ncl: This is the simplest panel plot. Three plots are draw and then placed on the page. In most instances, the user will also want to add a common title or label bar. Subsequent examples demonstrate these features.

gsn_panel is the plot interface that creates panel plots.

gsnDraw and gsnFrame should be set to false when drawing the individual plots so that they can be saved for the panel plot.
You do not, however, need to call these afterwards. gsn_panel calls them for you.

panel_2.ncl: Adds a common title to the plot.

To add a title, it is necessary to create a set of resources that are passed to only the panel template. It is best to give them a different name than the resources used for the individual plots. (e.g. resP = True)

txString is the resource that will automatically allocate space for a title and apply the title to the panel plot.

panel_3.ncl: Adds a common label bar to the plot.

lbLabelBarOn = False, Turns off the individual label bars, while gsnPanelLabelBar = True, adds a common label bar at the bottom of the plot. lbLabelFontHeightF is used to decrease the labels sizes of the common labelbar.

Remember to manually set the contour levels so that each plot has the same interval. The common label bar is draw from the first plot, and assumes all are the same.

panel_4.ncl: Adds some space at the bottom of the plot for more text.

gsnPanelBottom = 0.05, Is the panel plot resource that adds space at the bottom of the plot.

panel_5.ncl: Automatically adds text strings to the panel plot. These strings can be anything you want, but the text used here is most common.

gsnPanelFigureStrings = (/"a)","b)"/), is the resource that will add a string to a corner in a panel plot.

The default position is the bottom right-hand corner. In this example, we use amJust "TopLeft", to move them to the upper left-hand corner.

Additionally, amOrthogonalPosF and amParallelPosF will how close the boxes are to the axis. Zero is the center of the line, and 0.5 is flush with the right and -0.5 is flush with the left.

In NCL version 4.2.0.a28, you can use gsnPanelFigureStringsFontHeightF to adjust the font heights of the figure strings. Values range between 0 and 1, with the default being 0.01

In NCL version 4.2.0.a31, you can use gsnPanelFigureStringsPerimOn to turn off the box around the FigureString, and gsnPanelFigureStringsBackgroundFillColor to change the background color.

panel_6.ncl: Demonstrates the addition of white space to a panel plot. The first figure contains no white space. You can see it is somewhat cramped. The second figure as 5% white space added in both x and y. It looks much nicer.

gsnPanelYWhiteSpacePercent = 5
gsnPanelXWhiteSpacePercent = 5, Adds the white space to the panel plot.

panel_7.ncl: An example of a compressed panel plot. In this case we remove the longitude labels and tickmarks from the first two plots and keep only the one on the bottom. Since the plot template judges the spacing of the panel plot from the first plot, we need to add just a bit of space at the bottom like we did in example 4 in order to see the long labels on the bottom plot.

panel_8.ncl: Similar to example 7, except that we really start turning the tickmarks and their associated labels on and off.

panel_9.ncl: Create a panel plot using viewport specifications. This is required if the plots are of different shapes.

panel_10.ncl: There may be time when it is necessary to panel plots next to each other that have different sizes. If these plots can be attached, then the resulting new plot can be paneled.

In this example, we attach a zonal average plot to a Hovmueller diagram. The result is one plot that could then be paneled.

gsn_attach_plots is the plot interface that will attach the a group plots along the y-axis (default).

     _________________________________
     |       |       |       |       |
     | plot1 | plot2 | plot3 | plot4 |
     |       |       |       |       |
     _________________________________
 

If you set gsnAttachBorderOn to False, then it will remove the interior borders and look like this:

     _________________________________
     |                               |
     | plot1   plot2   plot3   plot4 |
     |                               |
     _________________________________
 

If you set gsnAttachPlotsXAxis to True, then the plot will be attached along the x-axis.

 gsnAttachBorderOn      gsnAttachBorderOn
  = True (default)           = False
     _________              _________
     |       |              |       |
     | plot1 |              | plot1 |
     |       |              |       |
     |-------|              |       |
     |       |              |       |
     | plot2 |              | plot2 |
     |       |              |       |
     |-------|              |       |
     |       |              |       |
     | plot3 |              | plot3 |
     |       |              |       |
     |-------|              |       |
     |       |              |       |
     | plot4 |              | plot4 |
     |       |              |       |
     ---------              ---------
 

Draw each plot separately, but then fine tune once you see them attached, and "scrunched". In our example, we removed the minor tickmarks and only plotted every other x-axis label.

HOW TO PANEL ATTACHED PLOTS:

1. Ensure that each plot is given a unique variable name that is never overwritten:
   

     plot1  = gsn_csm_hov (wks, chi(:,{lonE:lonW}), hres)
     xyplt1 = gsn_csm_xy(wks, x,y,xyres)
     plot2  = gsn_csm_hov(wks, chi(:,{220:320}), hres)
    xyplt2 = gsn_csm_xy(wks, x,y,xyres)
   

2. The function gsn_attach_plots returns a special id number (an integer), and not a plot (a graphical object).
   

     attachres1 = True
   
     attachres1@gsnAttachPlotsXAxis = True ; attaches along x-axis 
   
     attachres2 = True
   
     attachid1  = 
     gsn_attach_plots(plot1,xyplt1,attachres1,attachres2)
   
     attachid2  = 
     gsn_attach_plots(plot2,xyplt2,attachres1,attachres2)
   

3. The attached plot is now the first plot in the function call. herefore, feed this into the panel procedure:
   

    gsn_panel(wks,(/plot1,plot2/),(/2,1/),False)
   

4. If you were so inclined the special id number could be used to "unattach" an already attached plot by:

    NhlRemoveAnnotation(plot1,attachid1)
   

   plot1 would now only contain the original Hovmueller diagram.

panel_11.ncl: As of NCL version 4.2.0.a012, gsn_panel has the option of specifying how many plots should be placed on each row. To do this, set gsnPanelRowSpec = True.

The default layout is for the plots to be centered. You can change this by setting gsnPanelCenter = False.

panel_12.ncl: Demonstrates putting two separate panel plots on one page, so that each can have its own unique label bar.

The important thing to remember here, is to create two separate plot arrays to hold the individual plots for both panels. This is required b/c the label bar is taken from the last plot drawn.

gsnPanelRight = 0.5, tells the plot to only draw on the left 50% of the page, while gsnPanelLeft = 0.5, tells the plot to only draw on the right 50% of the page.

panel_13.ncl: Demonstrates paneling plots created with overlay.

panel_14.ncl: Demonstrates combining a two-panel panel plot with two manually placed line plots. This is required b/c gsn_panel assumes all the plots are the same size, and these plots are different enough to prevent their lining up axis to axis. Thanks to Keith Lindsay for this example.

The trick here is to divide the page into two sections. The lower section will just be for the contoured panel plot and its common label bar. We can tell gsn_panel to only draw its result in the lower half of the page by setting gsnPanelTop to 0.5.

Next, we make sure the width of the xy plots is the same as the contour plots by setting vpWidthF to its appropriate value. Finally, we exactly position each of the two xy plots in ndc space so that their axis line up with the contour plots. This is done by setting vpXF to its appropriate value.

panel_15.ncl: Demonstrates using gsn_panel twice in order to get groups of plots with different label bars.

The trick here is the setting of gsnPanelBottom and gsnPanelTop for the two respective panel plots. For the first panel, we move the bottom up to 0.4, which leaves 0.6 for the two panel plot. This means that each plot will be 0.3 in size. For the third, single panel plot, we draw only up to where the upper plot ended at 0.4. One more step is required, and that is to move the bottom of the bottom panel up to 0.1 so that the total draw area for this plot equals 0.3, just like we have for the upper plots. If you do not set gsnPanelBottom in this case, then the bottom plot has 0.4 space and will not be the same size as the upper two plots.

panel_16.ncl: Demonstrates using gsnPanelBottom and gsnPanelTop to "squeeze" the panel plots to approximately a column width for use in a publication. By setting gsnPanelTop = .9 and gsnPanelBottom = .2, the panel plots are drawn on .7 of the page instead of the entire page. This is a very easy way to shrink panel plots to a desired size.

panel_17.ncl: Demonstrates how to panel four plots that have two separate labelbars and a main title. The gsnPanelTop and gsnPanelBottom resources are used to make sure the two sets of plots are drawn in an area of the same size so that the plots are the same size, and then a small area is reserved for drawing the main title using gsn_text_ndc. The generate_2d_array function is used to generate dummy data for this example.

panel_18.ncl: Similar to example 15, this example demonstrates that the label bar need not explicitly have color in the middle. This is shown in the bottom panel, as cnFillColors is manually being set, and the background color (0, = white for BlAqGrYeOrRe colormap) is used to fill in all areas between -1 and 1.

panel_19.ncl: This example shows how to use the gsnPanelXF and gsnPanelYF resources to adjust the X and/or Y NDC positions of the upper left corners of plots in a panel. The first frame shows the paneled plots without adjustments, and the remaining two have both X and Y adjustments.

These resources must be arrays of the same size as the number of plots you have. Any individual plots that you don't want to adjust, you can set a negative value and the default value will be used.

You can optionally set gsnPanelDebug to True to have some debug information about the default X and Y positions being used, so you know approximately how much to tweak the values.

These resources will be added in version 4.3.0.

panel_20.ncl: This example shows how to use viewport resources vpXF, vpYF, vpWidthF, and vpHeightF, to to panel different-sized plots. If you try to use gsn_panel, you will get unexpected results.

In order to maximize these four plots in the frame, the procedure maximize_output is used.

panel_21.ncl: This example shows how to add a common title, and common x-axis and y-axis labels to a panel plot using gsn_text_ndc and the gsnPanelLeft, gsnPanelRight resources.

This script was written by Jonathan Vigh, a PhD candidate student in the Atmospheric Sciences department at Colorado State University.

panel_22.ncl: This example shows how to add individual common titles to a panel plot that actually contains two panelled plots (each 2 rows x 1 column).

You use the txString resource for the title, and you also need to set the txPosXF resource to values between 0 and 1, because otherwise both titles will be exactly centered on the page (=0.5).