Yelmo is an ice sheet simulation framework developed at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. It saves most of its results in .nc-files, which are commonly visualised in ncview, an interactive plotting GUI.
Even though ncview shows a great versatility, it also presents some drawbacks:
- If we want to compare multiple results, we need to open an ncview-instance for each file.
- Even by doing so, comparing 1D outputs can be tedious as they are plotted in seperated windows.
- 2D outputs are even harder to compare.
- The plots can only be modified up to a certain degree (e.g. colorscale, labels...) and cannot be saved into a vector-graphic format.
- It is not possible to apply a mask to 2D variables in order to generate 1D variables.
- Though a video of the 2D fields can be played, it cannot be directly saved into a publishable format.
Postprocess-yelmo (PPY) aims to offer these possibilities by a series of Python routines and classes. The use of postprocess-yelmo within a jupyter notebook allows us to interact with the plots and apply any modification if desired. Though all the above-mentioned drawbacks of ncview are solved by the use of PPY, it should be mentioned that ncview still offers a more developed GUI which is still irreplaceable in some cases.
PPY relies on standard python libraries. A .yml-environment is provided in the git repostory for any user to be able to run it rapidly.
As the features of PPY are best understood on a practical example, a jupyter notebook (ppy_demo.ipynb) demonstrates all its basic functionalities.
- Handle ensembles (read the .txt files mentioning the parameter combinations and create corresponding sliders/dropdowns).
- Make PPY suited for arbitrary ice sheet (essentially Greenland and Laurentide).
- Improved interactivity (e.g. select folder interactively, choose variables to be plotted from dropdown).
Colormaps are of great importance when it comes to generating plots for publications. Some user-defined maps are already implemented in ppy_colormaps. Any colormaps you create for your own publication is a welcomed contribution to ppy.