RE: [ncl-talk] NCL operationally

>> I sure hope we can get a good PNG driver out. I'm not sure why the
>> experimental one is so slow. What were the times for it?
>
> We've rerun the benchmark with the experimental PNG driver of NCL. It's
> a bit hard to compare, as both MetView and NCL(eps->pstoimg) make
> antialiased plots. We've tried to choose a size/resolution which would
> result in more or less the same quality of image.
>
> -------------------------------------------
> PS Plot Conversion to png Total
> convert pstoimg
> -------------------------------------------
> MetView (46) 50
> NCL 28 26 18 46
> NCL(png) 128
> -------------------------------------------
>
> Especially the fonts render very badly in the NCL(png) version.

I'm surprised to hear this about the direct PNG driver. But, perhaps
it behaves similarly to if you had taken an NCGM and converted to
a PNG through a series of raster conversions.

Maybe Fred, our PNG expert, can weigh in here.

>> From the NCL end, does it make a difference if you start with a "ps"
>> rather than an "eps" file?
>
> Yes, this didn't change the timings. This is to be expected, as output a
> ps simply adds a few lines to the eps.
>
>> Would it be possible for you to provide us with all the data files and
>> scripts so we can look at things here? You can email me offline about
>> this.
>
> I will send you the test case offline.
>
>>> - We will probably start introducing NCL operationally for
>> the first few
>>> plots quite soon... :-)
>>
>> Glad to hear that. :-)
>
> We had some discussions concerning the operational use of NCL. In that
> context it would be interesting to have some feedback on the following
> points:
> - What are the long term plans of NCAR for NCL?

We have a number of things on our plate, which are in various
stages. In no particular order:

     - Get V5.1.0 out the door!
     - 64-bit overhaul to allow the handling of dimension sizes > 2 Gb
     - Read/write support for NetCDF-4
     - Support for HDF-5, HDF-EOS5 (needs more research)
     - Vectors/streamlines on a triangular mesh (we already have this
       for contours)
     - Continue developing WRF-NCL
     - Overhaul GKS display model to allow for transparency, > 256
       colormaps, anti-aliasing, output to other formats (png), etc.
     - Output geotiff
     - Read shapefiles
     - Update addfiles to correctly deal with metadata
     - Vapor/NCL integration

Our list is quite lengthy. These are some of the bigger projects.

> - Are you aware of any other offices using NCL operationally?

Yes, the Research Applications Laboratory uses both NCL and NCAR
Graphics (I believe) to generate real-time weather plots.

See: http://www.ral.ucar.edu/weather/

>> It should be there, as we include ctrans with all distributions of
>> NCL. Did you build from source code? If so, perhaps ctrans didn't
>> build successfully.
>
> No, I simply downloaded the compile binaries for my platform. The ctrans
> binary does not seem to be present in the bin/ directory. I will mail
> you my machine specs offline.

Thanks, I'll try to get to this soon.

--Mary

> Cheers,
> Oli
>
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Received on Tue Jan 27 2009 - 08:04:42 MST