Welcome back to AWIPS Tips! Today we’re going to take a look at a few property options in CAVE. Specifically, we’re going to look at the Display Properties dialog which is found in the Options menu. The dialog should look something like this (this screenshot was taken on our MacOS version of CAVE):
Each of the options found in this dialog are also found in other places in CAVE. The options have been colorized in the above screenshot to aid in this blog (they are not actually colorized in the application).
The first three options – Scale, Load Mode, and Frames – are also found in the toolbar at the top of CAVE. The toolbar below has also been colorized to help correlate the options from the dialog:
The last four options in the Display dialog are found in the individual resource menus. It is important to realize that only graphic resources (such as surface obs, or contoured data) will have these options available, and image products (such as satellite imagery) will not. To access this menu, you must have a resource loaded, and then hold-right click on the resource you want to modify.
NOTE: Changing the settings through the resource menu will only change the display for that individual resource. Changing these settings through the Display Properties dialog will change the defaults for all loaded resources.
Scale
The scale is the current view of your map display. Some common scales for our use are CONUS (Continental United States), N. Hemisphere (Northern Hemisphere), and Regional (the region around the station CAVE is localized for, where OAX is the default). There are many more scales, and some may be more useful than others depending on what data you’re viewing.
Load Mode
The various load modes can change the way data is requested and loaded from EDEX into CAVE. This property is primarily used when requesting model data. Further details on the usage of each load mode can be found on our website.
Frames
The frames setting changes how many frames will be loaded when you add a new resource. Many of the options in the data menus have different default frames (GFS 1.0 has 41 frames for example). Changing the number of frames can help reduce or increase the amount of data you’re requesting from EDEX at a time. At the bottom of the CAVE window, you will see an indicator letting you know which frame you’re currently viewing, for example:
Mag
Mag stands for magnification. This setting changes the size of the text (if any) displayed on the map editor. For example, loading a model precipitation resource will create a contoured display with values for specific lines. Increasing the magnification will increase the font size for those values.
Density
Changing the density allows you to increase or decrease the amount of data you see at once. Again if you have contour (ex. precipitation) or point data (ex. wind barbs) loaded, you can increase and decrease the density of the values as desired for your display.
Line Width
Line width allows you to increase or decrease the thickness of any lines drawn in that resource.
Line Style
Line style allows you to change the way lines are drawn for the resource. The styles available are various types of solid or dashed lines.
NOTE: Line settings can also be applied to map resources.
Now that you know a little more about the drawing properties in CAVE, feel free to play around with them as you load various resources!
Check back in two weeks for the next blog post, where we touch on the localization structure in AWIPS.
To view archived blogs, visit the AWIPS Tips blog tag, and get notified of the latest updates from the AWIPS team by signing up for the AWIPS mailing list. Questions or suggestions for the team on future topics? Let us know at support-awips@unidata.ucar.edu
This blog was posted in reference to v18.2.1-6 of NSF Unidata AWIPS
