NCL Home>
Application examples>
Special plots ||
Data files for examples
Unique Visualizations
Most of the following examples were contributed by users who have used NCL
to create some truly unique and nice looking visualizations. This page is
mainly for showing off some of those visualizations.
If you have a unique or impressive visualization you would like to see
on this page, please email Mary
Haley or Adam Phillips
and include or attach the following:
- your NCL script(s)
- a PostScript file with no more than 3 frames (portrait mode, and
as large as possible)
- a brief explanation of your example (and optionally, yourself)
unique_1.ncl:
A real world plot showing the best tracks for a given season storms,
including all data (subtropical storms, depressions, extratropical
lows, etc).
This script was written by Jonathan Vigh, a PhD candidate student in
the Atmospheric Sciences department at Colorado State University.
unique_2.ncl:
A stick plot created by calling
gsn_vector and by
setting the resource
vcMapDirection = False,
which allow the vectors to be in their own reference frame.
This script was written by Matt Stumbaugh of NOAA.
unique_3.ncl:
A lengthy script that draws three different plots on the
top half of the page. Five different colormaps are used on one page
by drawing each individual plot before the next plot is created. This is done
by setting
gsnDraw = True (which is the default) or
by calling
draw before the next plot is created.
To avoid advancing the frame,
gsnFrame is set to False; the frame
is advanced at the end of the script by calling
frame.
unique_4.ncl:
This script creates an animation of the January 1996 snow storm. Wind
vectors are colored by temperature and overlaid on a map along with a
500 mb streamline plot and a color-filled pressure field contour plot.
Only three of the frames are shown here. but
click here for an animation.
unique_5.ncl:
This script creates a bar chart denoting monthly standard deviation
values for 4 different timeseries. The legend is created by using
gsn_legend_ndc.
unique_6.ncl:
This script creates a panel plot with ten XY plots and a legend at the
bottom. Each XY plot in the panel is an overlay of three plots with a
combination of solid lines, dashed lines, and markers. The
overlay function is used to do the overlays,
and the functions
gsn_text_ndc,
gsn_add_polymarker, and
gsn_legend_ndc are used to annotate the
figure.

unique_7.ncl (script not available yet):
This
animation, sent to us by
Dr. Ram Nair of SCD/NCAR, is a simulation of an idealized vortex
evolution on the sphere. He presented the result at an international
seminar PDEs on Sphere 2006. This is a test-case for
advection/transport problem on the sphere.
unique_8.ncl:
This script creates a contour plot of sea surface temperature and
overlays a storm track for Hurricane Katrina. It was contributed by
Kimberly Trent (a 2006
SOARS student of
NCAR/UCAR), with help from Adam Phillips and Mary Haley, also of NCAR.
The track data came from NHC reports from
the document "Tropical
Cyclone Report Hurricane Katrina" (Richard D. Knabb, Jamie
R. Rhome, and Daniel P. Brown). The SST field was
obtained from NCEP.
The storm track is done using filled and hollow circles, and
polylines. The circles are created using the
NhlNewMarker function. A legend is created using
calls to gsn_text and gsn_polymarker.
unique_9.ncl:
This script shows how to create a topographic map using a
raster contour graphic colored by elevation.
The elevation data and lat/lon information is read off a Fortran
binary file. This example is also available as a Python script using
PyNGL to generate the
graphics and PyNIO
to read the data from a netCDF file. See the PyNGL
gallery for a pointer to the script.
This example was written by Mark Stevens of NCAR.