Current limitations

Met.3D is research software, developed by a small group alongside their research. This page lists what it currently cannot do, so that you can find out early whether it fits your data and your platform.

For the reasoning behind the architectural ones, and what it would take to lift them, see Known limitations.

Data and grids

The horizontal grid has to be a regular longitude/latitude grid.

This is the central assumption of the data pipeline and of every GPU visualization algorithm. Model output on other horizontal grids has to be remapped before it can be used.

Native icosahedral (ICON) grids are not supported.

ICON output is supported once it has been remapped to a regular longitude/latitude grid — for example with cdo remapbil — including its hybrid sigma-pressure vertical coordinate. The native icosahedral grid is not supported, and reading it would require both a new grid type in the data pipeline and adapted sampling routines in the shaders.

Projected and rotated grids are experimental.

Support for rotated longitude/latitude grids and for proj4-projected grids exists but is switched off by default; it has to be enabled at compile time with -DEXPERIMENTAL_PROJECTION_SUPPORT. Cross-sections, surface topography and the volume raycaster work, but derived variables, smoothing-based and derivative-based products, and trajectories are not expected to be correct. See Experimental projection support.

Datasets must fit into memory.

Met.3D assumes that a single field — one variable, one ensemble member, one time step — fits into both system and GPU memory, and that the fields needed at once fit into the memory manager’s cache. There is no streaming and no level-of-detail mechanism for datasets that exceed this. See System requirements for how to size a machine.

Platform

macOS is not supported, because Met.3D requires OpenGL 4.3 and Apple caps OpenGL at 4.1. See Frequently Asked Questions for the details and for the currently supported platforms.

Reporting and following up

If something you need is missing or broken, please open an issue in the Met.3D issue tracker. If you would like to contribute a fix or a feature, How to contribute describes how to get started. Help is very welcome.