Actors

The visualization objects are called actors in Met.3D. They can be categorized into broadly three categories:

• Actors providing scene context

• Actors that manage gridded data

• Actors that manage trajectory data

The subsections of this page provide a short description of the actors, as well as descriptions of how to modify common actor properties. Major characteristics of the actors are listed, however, many actors provide more properties than currently documented.

Actors providing scene context

These actors as such do not hold any gridded data, but they provide the infrastructure needed for building the scene context.

• 1D transfer function (Colour map)
• Basemap
• Graticule
• Image
• Movable poles
• Volume bounding box

Actors that manage gridded data

These actors hold the gridded data and provide the various methods needed for visualizing the features.

Note

For all actors that visualize gridded data please note the following:

• The “variables” of the actors can be synchronized with the global time and ensemble settings but don’t have to be synchronized (e.g. if different ensemble members shall be compared).

• Availability of ensemble functionality depends on the data pipeline (if connected to an ensemble dataset, the pipeline can provide the data of different ensemble members or compute statistical quantities including ensemble mean and probabilities).

The following actors are currently able to visualize gridded data:

• Horizontal cross section
• Isosurface intersection
• Jet-stream core line detection
• Vertical cross section
• Volume raycaster (3D isosurfaces and DVR)
• Surface topography
• Skew-T Diagrams
• Radar actor

Adding variables

For all these actors, there exists an add new variable option. When clicking on execute, the list of variables available in the data loaded with the data pipeline is displayed and the user can choose the variable that needs to be added.

The user needs to repeat this step to add multiple variables or even the same variable multiple times. Also, once a variable has been added, it has options so that it can be removed or changed.

Getting information about a variables data

It is possible to get some statistics about the data of a given variable.

Also, it is possible to export the data to an external file for debugging purposes.

Smoothing the data

Met.3D provides options to smoothen the data.

Currently, horizontal smoothing is possible using either distance based or grid cell based modes. We recommend using the smooth mode “horizontalBoxBlur_distance” with “symmetric” boundary conditions.

Visualizing ensemble data

Met.3D supports ensemble visualization. Each variable by default is synchronized to temporal extents and ensemble size based on the data loaded using the data pipeline. By, turning off the ensemble synchronization, the user can choose the members and the ensemble mode. Currently individual member or ensemble mean, standard deviation, min, max, max-min, above or below a threshold are supported.

Actors that manage trajectory data

Met.3D currently includes one actor that implements functionality to visualize trajectory data (i.e., Lagrangian particle trajectories / path lines, or streamlines). These can either be precomputed or computed within the application from a given wind field.

The following actors are currently able to visualize trajectory data:

• Trajectory actor

See the actor documentation on further instruction how to load and display precomputed or on-the-fly computed trajectories.