<div>My experience has been similar to the other users' responses. I
found the IDV to be quite useful for quick, on-the-fly plotting that requires
very little effort. It is very user friendly, has plenty of customizable
options (color schemes, formulas, etc.), works very well in stereo (although
you have to modify the config file to do this), and has decent batch
support.<br><br>VAPOR requires a little more time and effort when plotting
fields. Some prior experience with other visualization packages such as
Paraview would be helpful. But it also gives you many additional options
and settings that are not available in the IDV. As a result, it might be
more useful for looking at specific phenomena that you are interested in,
whereas the IDV might be useful for getting an overview of an entire model
cycle. The stereo support in VAPOR is okay, but it's manual (specifying a
separation angle, left eye image, right eye image, etc.). This may be
useful to some users, but if your video card and software support splitting the
images automatically, this can be a pain. That's why I preferred the IDV
or Vis5D for stereo over using VAPOR.<br><br>The only other issue with the IDV
is as others have mentioned, it's memory intensive. Anything that uses
Java 3D will be. If you try to plot 3D derived fields from native WRF
NetCDF files in the IDV...make a sandwich, take a nap, and then when you come
back...it should be ready. This is because the native WRF NetCDF grids
are staggered and when you load them into the IDV, it does a transform to
pressure coordinates and also stores the native grid domain into memory.
Then if you have many grid points, it slows things down even more since it's
resampling at each grid point. If you can destagger the grids using
WRFPost or ARWPost, it definitely speeds things up. I always converted
from NetCDF -> Vis5D, but you can also do it to GRIB and other formats as
well.<br><br>I am looking forward to doing more work with VAPOR in the Fall,
and I think it could be very useful. Since both projects are under active
development, it's likely improvements will continue. Both are excellent
pieces of software though, and I think it's definitely worth learning
both.<br><br>--Josh Gelman.<br><br>On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 05:34 PM, <b>Leigh Orf
<leigh.orf@cmich.edu></b> wrote:<br><blockquote id="quoted_response"
style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); padding-left: 3px; padding-right:
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<pre>
"Mark Stoelinga" wrote:
| I'm curious about IDV and VAPOR, two relatively new
| visualization and analysis packages from UCAR (IDV from
| Unidata, first released in 2004, and VAPOR from NCAR/CISL,
| first released in 2006). I admit I haven't tried either of
| them, but from the web pages, they both look like great
| software packages, with much effort poured into them. I have
| seen a increasing discussion on the users' email list about
| both of these packages recently.
|
| My first question is from a policy perspective: Why is UCAR
| developing two major visualization/analysis packages that, at
| first glance, seem to have many of the same capabilities?
|
| I'm also curious about WRF users' experiences with these
| two packages. How seamless are each of these packages with
| ingesting native WRF system data? What are users' experiences
| with using these two packages for analyzing and displaying
| WRF system data? Has anyone used both, and has an opinion on
| relative strenghts and weaknesses?
|
| Mark
</pre></blockquote><br></div>