Changes between Version 7 and Version 8 of doc/app/vapor

Timestamp:

Dec 3, 2012 6:24:50 PM (12 years ago)

Author:

hschulz

Comment:

added documentation for nc2vdf

doc/app/vapor

@@ -3 +3 @@
 VAPOR is the Visualization and Analysis Platform for Ocean, Atmosphere, and Solar Researchers. VAPOR provides an interactive 3D visualization environment that runs on most UNIX and Windows systems equipped with modern 3D graphics cards. It has been developed by [[http://ncar.ucar.edu|NCAR]] and is freely available at [http://www.vapor.ucar.edu].\\
 \\
-An official UI reference manual is available [[http://www.vapor.ucar.edu/docs/reference/UIRef/ReferenceManual.pdf|here]]. Please find also a small tutorial in german language attached to this page [[attachment:2010_5_vapor.pdf|here]].\\
-\\
-For the conversion of NetCDF data output from PALM to the VAPOR format vdf, the tool ncdf2vdf has been developed at IMUK and will come along with PALM in the near future.
+An official UI reference manual is available [[http://www.vapor.ucar.edu/docs/reference/UIRef/ReferenceManual.pdf|here]]. Please find also a small tutorial in german language attached to this page [[attachment:2010_5_vapor.pdf|here]].
 
 == System requirements ==
@@ -16 +14 @@
 
 == Conversion of NetCDF to VDF data ==
-coming soon.
+VAPOR has its own mechanism for storing field data and its associated attributes (metadata). The components of a VAPOR Data Collection (VDC) are distributed across different disk files. All metadata for a VDC are stored in a single .vdf file. See [[http://www.vapor.ucar.edu/docs/vapor-data-preparation/vapor-data-preparation|here]] for more information.\\
+\\
+For the conversion of NetCDF data output from PALM to the VAPOR format, the tool ncdf2vdf has been developed at IMUK. nc2vdf collects a list of parameters and uses the command line tools vdfcreate and ncdf2vdf, that come with VAPOR, to create the metadata file and populate the data collection automatically with all variables and time steps chosen by the user.\\
+The tool can be used in two ways, an interactive command line prompt asking for all necessary information and a non interactive mode reading all input parameters from a configuration file. The non interactive mode may be preferred for converting large data sets and can be used as a batch job on any HLRN system.\\
+\\
+The script can be started from the terminal in interactive mode by:\\
+{{{nc2vdf}}} ,\\
+or providing a configuration file via:\\
+{{{nc2vdf ./anypath/nc2vdf.config}}} .
+\\
+An example configuration file can be found in the folder trunk/SCRIPTS. The configuration uses NCL syntax.\\
+\\
+To use nc2vdf on your own workstation with VAPOR installed (Linux or Mac systems) you may edit the appropriate lines in the NCL script nc2vdf.ncl.
 
 == Starting VAPOR at IMUK ==