VAPOR

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 ​NCAR and is freely available at ​http://www.vapor.ucar.edu.

An official UI reference manual is available ​here. Please find also a small tutorial in german language attached to this page 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.

System requirements

The official VAPOR FAQ say:

• We recommend a minimum of 512 MBs of main memory. VAPOR relies heavily on RAM for caching data in order to improve performance. So the more memory you have, the better the performance, in general.This is particularly true when animating through temporal data.

• A graphics card with 3D hardware texture support and an OpenGL driver that can take advantage of the card are a must. Note that standard Linux distributions come with a generic driver that will work on all systems, but this will usually not give adequate performance. For best performance a driver provided by the graphics card vendor is essential. If you plan to use Linux and have not yet purchased a graphics card, you should check that the card you are considering purchasing has a driver optimized for Linux.

Conversion of NetCDF to VDF data

coming soon.

Starting VAPOR at IMUK

VAPOR (version 2.1.0) is installed on the Linux server at IMUK and can be started from the terminal:

. /muksoft/packages/vapor/2.1.0/bin/vapor-setup.sh; vaporgui&.

The VAPOR window will appear.