Miscellaneous Features

This page summarizes several addtional convenient features in QuickView.

Choosing map projection and extent

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 map extent, i.e., the latitude-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 FullPanel.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 Full grid 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 2.6.0, 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.