20020801: Question about McIDAS

>From: "Kevin Polston" <address@hidden>
>Organization: NWS
>Keywords: 200208011855.g71Itc908945 McIDAS-X PANEL

Kevin,

>How is your summer going?  It is very hot (and muggy) here.

Busy, busy, busy :-)

>I've got a
>question for you about the newest version of McIdas.  Can McIdas do 4
>panel images?  For instance, if you had the radar data coming in could
>you display a 4 panel of different tilts of reflectivity?

Yes.  McIDAS supports the concept of panelized frames.  You can, for
instance, turn a single frame into an NxM set of panels in which
you can display whatever you want.  The only inflexible part of this
is that there is only one image enhancement and one graphics pallette
per frame.  This means that displaying say a VIS satellite and
a radar base reflectivity image in different panels on the same frame
would not look like you probably want: if one uses the IMAGE.ET enhancemnt,
then the image will look "normal" and the radar will look weird (gray
scale is weird for radar echos), and visa versa.

>Or could you
>have a 4 panel of maybe the lowest 2 tilts of reflectivity and velocity
>at the same time?

Yes, absolutely.  An example of loading all panels of a 4 panel frame
with different NEXRAD N0R tilts can be seen in:

http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/staff/tom/gifs/n0rpanel.gif

>If you can do 4 panels does this capability extend to
>other data sets as well.....like model data or satellite imagery?

Yup.  Just remember the comment about all panels share the same image
enhancement and graphics pallette.

>And
>if you are in a 4 panel mode....can you zoom in individually on one
>particular panel and would you lose any resolution if you did so?

Zooming a display in an existing frame in McIDAS is simply a process of
telling the X server to blow up the display by replicating pixels.
Also, one zooms an entire frame, not just a panel in the frame.  If you
want to see the display at a higher resoltion, you need to reload the
contents of the frame/panel.  By the way, a save to a GIF (tm), JPEG,
etc. of a frame does not preserve the zoom of the display.  It simply
represents the entire contents of the frame in its unzoomed state (I
just tried this, so I know).

>I
>suppose all of this is a moot point if you can't do 4 panels but I seem
>to recall you could do 4 panels....

You could do 64 panels if you wanted; I don't know the limit!.

>at least with model data. But that
>has been a long time ago.

Each panel has its own navigation and can be individually addressed by
all commands.

>I was curious about this and I know your the
>guy with the answers.  :-)  I may have some more questions later but
>those were the ones I had now.  I was just going through the McIdas web
>pages you have and it got me thinking about this.

No worries.

>Talk to you later,

Later...

Tom