Here is a brief introduction to using the advanced visualisation package.

It should look like:

The View button (top left) lets you change the type of plot which is produced:

General

-Timescale: timestep updates the field as your model runs, season lets you select one or more season in one or more year - so you could plot the average December/ January/ February surface temparature for 1810-1820 (use control left click to select multiple years) and year lets you plot the average surface temperature over one or more year. Note that, to be able to view fields in season or year mode, you need to have completed at least one phase of the experiment, and you can only view fields from completed phases of the experiment (this is because of the data processing that happens at the end of each phase).

-Field: Surface temperature, (surface) pressure, total precipitation (rain & snow), rainfall, snowfall, Top Of Atmosphere infrared brightness temperature (a measure of how much heat the Earth is losing to space), total cloud amount and plot memory (used in conjuction with the memory button on the top left of the screen).

-Plot Type: allows you to select whether you see the plot in colour or black and white etc.

Projection

This may be either cylindrical or satellite. If you choose to view a cylindrical projection, you can control the boundaries of the plot, either by specifying them explicitly, or by left clicking on the plot itself to zoom in. If you choose to view a satellite projection, you can control which bit of the Earth the satellite is hovering over.

My Scale

This menu allows you to choose an appropriate contour scale for your plot - so if your world is particularly warm, you can extend the colour scale upwards (the extend scale options add one more colour to the end of the scale, for more drastic changes you have to specify a complete new scale).

Overlay

This menu allows you to overlay (with line contours) one field over another - so you could overlay pressure onto surface temperature, or precipitation onto cloud, to get a feel for how these fields interrelate. You can also overlay wind vectors (not on timestep fields) which are arrows showing the direction and strength of the wind. Vector skip controls how many vectors are plotted ( e.g. if vector skip=1, vectors are plotted at every other grid point) and vector length allows you to control the scale of the vectors.

These are fields which have been averaged in longitude i.e. you make the Earth 2-Dimensional by averaging all the values on each latitude circle - so you can see how the fields change with height. The main new option here is that you can chose whether the height scale is linear in height (as it is in the real world, with pressure dropping off exponentially with distance from the Earth's surface) or pressure (related to the mass of air), which lets you see what most of the air molecules in the atmosphere are doing.

This lets you see how the vertical structure of the atmosphere varies with time at a given latitude (again is has been averaged in longitude). No new options here.

These are fields which have been averaged both in longitude and latitude.

You can either plot these in timestep mode, in which case you see the fields evolving over 1/ 2/ 7 days in the model you have running currently. In year mode, you can see the results for all the completed phases of the experiment. The default is to plot global mean data, but you can deselect this and instead choose to plot the evolution of the field at a given latitude and longitude. Long degs and Lat degs allow you to specify the size of the box you are looking at - so a 1° by 1° box centred on 52° N, 0°W would approximately cover London. You can choose to plot 2 fields simultaneously (field 2 appears with a dashed line). The my scale menu allows you to choose an appropriate y axis for the plot (look at the numbers appearing in the box on the bottom of the window to see what scale is appropriate). If you choose to set a scale for one of the fields, you have to set a scale for the other too. N.B. If you decide half way through plotting a timestep mode surface average field that its taking too long and you want to plot something else instead, you must press 'Stop' or the package will keep reverting to that field until it has finished.

The memory button allows you to save a season/ year surface field which you have plotted into memory. If you then create another season/ year surface field, you can use the memory menu options to add or difference (subtract) the new field from the old one. Using the field menu in the general menu, you can then plot memory. So, for example, you could plot 1825-1840 year mean surface temperature, add the field to memory, then plot 2050-2065 year mean surface temperature, difference from memory, and then plot memory to see how average surface temperatures changed when carbon dioxide was doubled.

The file menu gives the following options:

Back to visualisation package introduction.