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Although your old icons will still (mostly) work in Metview 4 (interactively and in Macro), you may wish to convert some of them to the new formats in order to use the new parameters available. As an example, suppose you have a Contouring icon from Metview 3 which you wish to convert into a Metview 4 Contouring icon. In Metview 4, first create a new contour icon. Edit this icon, and drop your old icon into the icon editor. The parameters which are valid in the new icon will be transferred; you can now click Apply to save the new icon.
Contouring
To make use of the new features of Magics, Metview 4 uses a new Contouring icon. One feature of Metview 3 which is not directly available in Metview 4 is Contour Splitting. This was a feature which enabled different isoline styles to be applied above, below and on a particular threshold (typically zero, for the purpose of examining the difference between two fields). To emulate this behaviour in Metview 4 requires the creation of three separate contour icons which can then be dropped together into the plot (or converted into three separate calls to mcont). See Migration: Split Contours for example Macro code and plots.
In Macro, pcont is replaced by mcont.
Coastlines
Metview 4's Coastlines icon has many more features than in Metview 3. One important thing to note is that in Metview 4 the coastline resolution has a much greater impact on the plot; a full-globe map with high resolution coastlines will be much too detailed, will take a long time to plot and will produce a very large (vector format) output file. The default resolution setting, Automatic, is intended to provide a reasonable balance between detail and efficiency. In Macro, pcoast is replaced by mcoast.
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Metview 4 has a new icon for handling legends - the Legend icon in the Visual Definitions drawer (Macro function mlegend()). This replaces the legend functionality that used to be in the Text Plotting and Legend Entry icons.
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Metview 4's Text Plotting icon no longer has any legend parameters - these are all now contained in the Legend icon. In addition, the way to specify user text in a title has changed a little. Metview 3 contained options to specify whether a title contained automatic text, user text or both; Metview 4 instead has a default title line which is "<magics_title/>". Any text line with this string will have the automatic title; lines without it will not. Magics++ also has features, still to be fully documented here, to automatically add GRIB meta-data to a 'semi-automatic' plot title using GRIB_API keys. For instance, where Metview 3 used !PARAM! Metview 4 would use <grib_info key='name'/>. Another commonly-encountered change is that instead of Text Reference Character Height, Metview now has Text Font Size. In Macro, ptext is replaced by mtext.
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The new Symbol Plotting icon provides access to a particularly useful feature of Magics - Advanced symbol plotting mode. This allows the automatic creation of colour scales in much the same way as is available for contouring. In Macro, psymb is replaced by msymb.
Graph Plotting
The new Graph Plotting icon is very similar to that in Metview 3. In Macro, pgraph is replaced by mgraph.
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Metview 4 no longer has a Satellite View icon (this projection is not currently supported by Magics++). Any , but something should be available in the future. For now, any satellite imagery should be reprojected to lat/long using Metview's Reprojection module.
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Metview 4 completely revised its handling of ODB data and does not recognise any Metview 3 ODB icons. Consequently, such icons will not be visible in Metview 4. However, all the ODB functionality of Metview 3, plus a lot more, is available in Metview 4. Please see the Tutorials page for the ODB tutorial.
Tephigrams
The Tephigram icons have been replaced by the Thermo Data icon.
Overlay
In Metview 4, the default behaviour is to always overlay fields from different sources, even if their meta-data, such as date/time, do not match. This is different from Metview 3, whose default behaviour was to only overlay data whose timestamps 'match'. In Metview 3, there was a separate icon, the Overlay Control icon, which could be dropped into a View icon to change the overlay settings. In Metview 4 this is simpler, with a Map Overlay Control parameter directly in the Geographical View icon.
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These icons are currently restricted to returning a single frame (Metview 3 could, for instance, return a set of cross sections if there were multiple parameters or times in the input data). This feature is in the process of being implemented, and further documentation is is available specifically for the 4.4 release of Metview, which contains further small revisions to the interface. See New Cross Section, Average, Vertical Profile and Hovmoeller modules in Metview 4.4.
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There are some functionalities in Metview 3 which are not yet available in Metview 4, even with workarounds.
- Tephigrams are not available
- The Metview-Vis5D interface is not availablehas been replaced with an interface to the VAPOR software; see 3D visualisation with VAPOR
- Native plotting support for satellite projection images - the workaround is to use the Reprojection module to reproject the data onto a regular lat/lon grid, then plot this onto a Geo View using the Geos projection. This is currently limited to having its centre at zero degrees longitude.
- Hovmoeller, cross section, zonal/meridional mean and vertical profile plots only generate a plot for the first set of data supplied. In Metview 3 for instance, you could supply a time series of vertical level data to the Cross Section module and receive one plot per time step; now, only the first time step will be plotted. The workaround is to write some Macro code to loop through the steps/parameters/etc and generate one plot at a time.
- The Satellite View is not available - see above
- The Contents Drawer is not available from the Display Window
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