psy-view vs. ncview

When developping psy-view, we had the intuitiveness of ncview in mind, a light-weight graphical user interface to visualize the contents of netCDF files.

In general, psy-view can do everything that ncview does, and more.

ncview screenshot

The following table tries to summarize the differences of the features for both softwares. If you feel like anything is missing or wrong, please tell us by creating a new issue at https://github.com/psyplot/psy-view/issues/

psy-view vs. ncview

Feature

psy-view

ncview

supported grids

  • rectilinear (i.e. standard \(nx\times ny\) grid)

  • ICON (triangular, hexagonal, etc.)

  • UGRID (triangular, hexagonal, etc.)

rectilinear

supported plots

  • georeferenced plots

  • standard 2D-plots

  • line plots

  • georeferenced plots

  • standard 2D-plots

  • line plots

mouse features

  • plot a time series when clicking on a plot

  • show coordinates and data when hovering the plot

  • plot a time series when clicking on a plot

  • show coordinates and data when hovering the plot

View the data

not yet implemented

comes with a simple and basic editor

image export

all common formats (e.g. PDF, PNG, GIF, etc.) with high resolution

PS

animation export

GIF, MP4 (using ffmpeg or imagemagick)

Note

This is a beta feature

not implemented

GUI (Graphical User Interface) startup time

fast locally, slow via X11

fast

projection support

  • decodes CF-conformal grid_mapping attributes

  • plots on standard lat-lon projection only

supported files

anything that is supported by xarray (netCDF, GRIB, GeoTIFF, etc.)

netCDF files only

Language

Entirely written in Python with the use of

Entirely written in C

Extensibility

psy-view is built upon psyplot, so you can

  • export the plot settings

  • use it in python scripts

  • use the more general psyplot GUI

cannot be extended