Miscellaneous Features

QuickView includes various convenient features tailored to Earth system modelers' analysis workflow.

• Cursor probe
• Choosing map projection and geographical region
• Saving the visualization

Cursor probe

Starting in version 2.8.3, QuickView provides a Cursor Probe for inspecting data values at the cursor location. Two modes are available:

Icon	Mode	Description
	Hover Mode	Updates continuously as the cursor moves over contour plots in the viewport.
	Click Mode	Updates only when the user clicks a location in a contour plot. This mode may provide better responsiveness when working with very large datasets.

In both modes, information associated with the cursor location is displayed in an Information Panel, as shown in the screenshot here. The latitude and longitude of the cursor location are shown at the top, followed by the name and value of the variable in the current view, as well as the names and values of the other variables displayed in the viewport. If a variable has non-horizontal dimensions, the value shown in the Information Panel is the value at the cursor-selected lat-lon location in the currently data slice.

The Cursor Probe is inactive by default and can be activated by clicking either the Hover Mode or Click Mode icon in any viewport panel. These icons are available in all views for convenient access. However, the probe's activate/inactive state applies to the entire viewport and is shared across all views. As a result, the Cursor Probe cannot be enabled for some views (variables) while remaining disabled for others.

Choosing map projection and geographical region

The map projection used for the contour plots can be changed using the mini menu activated by a click on the Earth icon in the vertical tool bar—or by keyboard shortcuts:

• C for cylindrical equidistant,
• R for Robinson, and
• M for Mollweide.

The geographical region, i.e., the latitude and longitude bounds to be displayed in the contour plots, can be adjusted using the sliders in the lat/lon cropping panel activated by a click on the Earth grid icon in the vertical toolbar.

Saving the visualization

In addition to saving the state of the current session so that the analysis can be resumed later, QuickView provides three ways for the user to save the visualization as images or animations for presentations and manuscripts, etc.:

• A click on the camera icon at the end of the vertical toolbar saves the entire viewport—in its current layout—to the local computer as Viewport.png.

• A click on the camera icon next to the variable name inside a view panel saves that single view as a .png file. The file name starts with the variable name; dimension names and indices are appended when relevant. For example, aero_tau_sw-lev-71-swband-00.png is an image of variable aero_tau_sw at lev index 71 and swband index 0.

• Let us assume the user has been inspecting 4 variables along the lev dimension, as depicted by the screenshot here. To export animations showing how these variables change in that dimension, the user can click on the icon on the right end of the animation control panel, i.e., the downward arrow with two lines, to bring up a drop-down menu and then click to select Viewport and/or individual variables. Subsequently, a click on Export animation triggers QuickView to scan through the indices in the lev dimension, with a dark-red circle spinning around the download button while the scan is in progress. After the scan is finished, a file quickview-animation.zip gets downloaded to the local computer. This file is a zipped folder that may contain multiple files.

Note: as of version 2.6.1, the animation export downloads images of individual frames to the local computer, and the user needs to use a tool to combine the images into an animation (or animations). Direct download of animation files will be provided soon.

If the user clicks the animation download button again while the dark-red circle is still spinning, the click will end the scan. A .zip file will still be downloaded and will contain images from index 0 to the last index that QuickView has scanned.