Re: Plotting high resolution data

Hi Matthew,

It is true that AreaFill can be very slow with high-resolution data
and/or many contour levels. However, unless you need part of the
gridded data area to be transparent you can make RasterFill look
almost identical by setting cnRasterSmoothingOn to True. Of course, a
RasterFill plot is essentially a pixel-based plot rather than a vector
plot so the pixelation will be evident if you enlarge it or zoom into
a section. Should you need a very high resolution plot there are
several resources that control the ultimate pixel size, including
cnRasterMinCellSizeF , cnRasterCellSizeF, cnRasterSampleFactorF, and
depending on the output workstation, wkWidth, wkHeight,
wkPSResolution, or wkPDFResolution.

All that said, we are aware that there are faster vector contouring
algorithms than the routines used by NCL. A lot of the reason for that
is the generality of the code, especially its ability to mask out
specific areas for labels, etc. We have discussed the possibility of
incorporating new and faster contouring methods, and hopefully that
will be possible before too long. To be honest, however, there are a
number of things on the to-do list that have to be accomplished before
we can turn our attention to this issue.
  -dave

On Mar 16, 2010, at 9:23 AM, Matthew Janiga wrote:

> NCL-Talk,
>
> This is a fairly general question. I've noticed that when plotting
> high resolution data (for instance several km resolution satellite
> data) that NCL takes a very long time to produce a color-filled
> contour plot (cnFillMode = AreaFill); a raster plot will be made
> fairly quickly (cnFillMode = RasterFill) but don't look as nice. I ask
> this question because ncview can draw the color-filled contour plots
> quickly enough to animate the dataset like a movie. Is this simply a
> limitation of NCL or postscript output? Has anyone else ran into a
> simillar problem and/or is this an issue that may be addressed in
> future versions of NCL.
>
> Cheers,
> Matt
>
> --
> **********************************
> Matthew A. Janiga
> Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, ES 330
> University at Albany / State University of New York
> 1400 Washington Avenue
> Albany, NY 12222
> PH: (847) 962-8397
> Email: janiga@atmos.albany.edu
> **********************************
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Received on Wed Mar 17 11:47:12 2010