Skip to content

EAM QuickView

eam-quickview-full

Overview

EAM QuickView is an open-source, Python-based application for interactive visualization of simulation data produced by the atmosphere component of the Energy Exascale Earth System, EAM.

While comprehensive tools like ParaView and VisIt are widely used in the scientific community, they often present a steep learning curve—requiring users to navigate unfamiliar interfaces, functions, and jargon. Moreover, these general-purpose tools may lack out-of-the-box support for key requirements in atmospheric science, such as globe and map projections or support for specific data formats, leading to time-consuming customization or feature requests. EAM QuickView was developed to address these limitations by offering a focused, user-friendly platform that streamlines the analysis of atmospheric simulations. It minimizes the need for EAM developers and users to write custom scripts, thereby reducing “last-mile” effort and accelerating the path from data to insight.

The core goal of QuickView is a first glance at the contents in a simulation data file—the characteristic values of physical quantities and their variations with respect to geographical location, altitude, and time, a capability that is especially valuable for tasks such as simulation/model verification, validation, and qualitative data exploration. Compared to earlier and widely used tools like ncview and ncvis, QuickView has an emphasis on multivariate visualization and is currently focused on the EAM model.

Key Features

  • Clean and minimalist UI tailored for atmosphere modeling workflows

  • Push-button visualization of multiple variables

  • Persistent state: "Pick up where you left off"

  • Supports EAM atmospheric model data from current (E3SMv2, v3) and upcoming (v4) versions

Further Reading

QuickView leverages ParaView for backend data processing and Trame for an intuitive, browser-based user interface.

To learn more about the installation of QuickView checkout the installation guide.

To learn more about using QuickView, checkout the brief overview.

Point of Contact

QuickView is a product of an interdisciplinary collaboration supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Biological and Environmental Research (BER) and Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) via the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program. The lead developer of QuickView is Abhishek Yenpure at Kitware Inc.