Relative Vorticity Contouring

[Eric Altshuler]

That is odd because in my experience it is in animations that contouring and color schemes can be ill-suited to the data being plotted. That's because whatever contouring scheme is used (or chosen by grads) for the first frame, is also applied to all the remaining frames so as to ensure the same contouring scheme for the whole animation. This can be a problem, though, if the data field being animated changes a lot during the animation (e.g. a rapidly intensifying hurricane).

When your are plotting each time step individually, grads chooses the contouring/color scheme separately for each step unless you set it yourself. In this situation, if the character of the data field changes significantly in time, grads will choose new contouring schemes to suit the data at each time step. The disadvantage here is that the contouring scheme is not consistent across all frames. It's a tradeoff.

How are you doing your animations? Are you setting T to vary and plotting the variable, or have you set up a script loop to display one time step, sleep for some interval, advance T and then display the next time step? The behavior of animations using these two methods can be quite different.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dizzle Man" <selfscience06 at GMAIL.COM>
To: GRADSUSR at LIST.CINECA.IT
Sent: Saturday, August 2, 2008 1:28:03 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Relative Vorticity Contouring

Hello Everyone,

I am doing a plots for relative voricity [hcurl(u,v)].  The issue that I am
having is when I run my animation I get a beautiful sequence of images, so
when I begin the plot each time step individually I do not receive that same
contouring intervals that is displayed in the animation. Its like the
individual plotting loses coloring, but that animation gives me what I am
looking for. Does this make sense? I was wondering how can I maintain the
color sequence that the animation gives for individual time step plotting?