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Welcome back to AWIPS Tips!

This week we’re going to take a quick look at one of the basic, but important, features of CAVE. Almost all of the data available in CAVE is time-based, and to deal with this, CAVE has a concept of “frames’. Each frame is usually similar data from a different time (ie. 10 minutes ago, 5 minutes ago, now), but in some special cases (for models and radar data) it can show slightly different, but related data.

When you load data from the menus, you end up loading the default number of frames associated with that menu item. This number can be different for different products. The current and total number of frames are displayed at the bottom of CAVE in the following format:

Let’s take a look at some examples.

We can load some GOES satellite data by using the satellite menu:

Once the data loads, we can see the total number of frames, at the bottom of the CAVE window:

The satellite data loaded with 12 frames by default.
Now let’s take a look at some model data:

Looking at the bottom of the window we can see this data loaded with 45 frames:

This is because, as mentioned before, some menu items have different default number of frames. Each menu item is associated with a bundle file, and these files can be edited to change their default behavior if desired.

If we clear all the data, and take a look at the frame count option at the top of CAVE, we can sometimes override what’s in the bundle loaded from the menu item.
For example, if we change the frame count to 25:

And then load the same satellite data as before, we can see it now loaded 25 frames, instead of 12:

As we said before, the bottom of the screen shows the current frame and the total loaded frames. So, we are currently on the 25th of 25 frames – meaning we’re looking at the latest, or most recent, data. We can “scroll” through our frames by using the left and right arrow keys on the keyboard.

Notice the timestamp in the lower right hand corner in the resource stack also changes with the frames, enabling you to see the frames are indeed “stepping through time”, and allowing you to know where you are in the loaded data.

Thanks for joining us to learn about frames in CAVE! Check back in two weeks for our next blog post, highlighting Texas A&M and their use of CAVE in the classroom.

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This blog was posted in reference to v18.2.1-6 of NSF Unidata AWIPS