Welcome to Met.3D
Met.3D is an open-source visualisation tool for interactive, three-dimensional visualisation of numerical ensemble weather predictions and similar numerical atmospheric model datasets. The tool is implemented in C++ and OpenGL 4 and runs on standard commodity hardware. Its only “special” requirement is an OpenGL 4.3 capable graphics card.
Note
Met.3D is open-source, and available on Gitlab. The software is licensed under the GNU General Public License, Version 3.
Met.3D currently runs under Linux. It has originally been designed for weather forecasting during atmospheric research field campaigns, however, is not restricted to this application. Besides being used as a visualisation tool, Met.3D is intended to serve as a framework to implement and evaluate new 3D and ensemble visualisation techniques for the atmospheric sciences.
Note
A Met.3D reference publication has been published in Geoscientific Model Development and is available online:
Rautenhaus, M., Kern, M., Schäfler, A., and Westermann, R.: “Three-dimensional visualization of ensemble weather forecasts – Part 1: The visualization tool Met.3D (version 1.0)”, Geosci. Model Dev., 8, 2329-2353, doi:10.5194/gmd-8-2329-2015, 2015.
Met.3D is currently developed within the Visual Data Analysis Group at the Regional Computing Center, Universität Hamburg, Germany. We hope you find the tool useful for your work, too. Please let us know about your experiences.
The documentation for Met.3D is organised into the following sections:
Information about development is also available:
Attention
The documentation you are reading is work in progress. We are adding bits and pieces whenever we find time. If you don’t find the information you are looking for, please contac us. If you like to contribute to the documentation, please let us know as well!
User Documentation
The user documentation provides Installation instructions, information on First steps with Met.3D and more detailed information about supported data, user interface components, and visualisation modules of Met.3D.
In addition, Specific tasks are described, and some examples are presented.
If you are missing information relevant to your work, please let us know!
Developer Documentation
Large parts of the Met.3D source code have already been documented with the Doxygen
code documentation system. A Doxygen configuration file is available in the
Met.3D repository (in the doc/doxygen subdirectory). Please run Doxygen
locally to build the corresponding documentation.
Contribution
If you are contributing to the Met.3D code base, please carefully read the Met.3D contribution guidelines. They contain information on the used GIT workflow and coding conventions. As the project is continuously growing, please adhere to the listed conventions.
Architecture documentation
Conceptual descriptions of the architecture of selected features in Met.3D are provided in Architecture overview. This section will be expanded in the future.