The CRMe Viewer provides an accessible user interface that exposes the vast amount of CRMe output to users to allow rapid exploration and analysis. The viewer is not intended to provide a detailed search capability, as this is already provided by the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) search interface. Rather, the CRMe Viewer provides ready access to the plots and datasets in an interface that is easily accessible from devices ranging from desktops to phones to touchscreens.
The CRMe Viewer is implemented in modern html5, Javascript, php, and jQuery. To use the viewer, you must be using a modern browser (e.g., Internet Explorer 9.0 or higher and/or recent versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or Safari). You must also have Javascript enabled.
Jonathan Vigh designed and developed the initial CRMe Viewer in about a month's time in Sept/Oct 2015. This effort was supported by several climate-related projects at the Research Applications Laboratory. Caspar Ammann provided creative input and overall project guidance. Adam Carhedan and Lara Ziady provided helpful answers to technical questions.
The developer thanks Menu Cool for their great tooltip example. The CRMe Viewer now uses a modified button-based version of these tooltips to guide users on the meaning of the various climate indices.
The developer sends kudos to the developers of the jQuery lightGallery package for developing such a useful and usable lightbox package. The CRMe Viewer uses lightGallery to provide the snazzy lightbox feature that allows users to view a plot at full screen and even zoom in further. Thanks to nifty package, users on touch-enabled devices can use touch gestures to conveniently swipe between plots.
1. The CRMe Viewer does not work on the Safari web browser. For best performance, please use the latest versions of Chrome or Firefox.
2. Some users may experience an issue in which the plot images become very tiny (but are still clickable). In this event, the user should highlight the CRMe URL in the top of the browser and hit 'Enter'. This will force a full reload of the viewer and should remedy the problem.
3. CRMe has not been fully tested on mobile platforms yet.
The following improvements were made in this version upgrade:
The following improvements are planned in this future version upgrade:
The following improvements were made in this version upgrade:
The following improvements were made in this version upgrade:
This major version upgrade includes the following upgrades and enhancements:
This version includes some major 'under the hood' improvements to the viewer engine to reduce the incidence of dead paths and improve the usability of the viewer. This is the first version to be developed in the new sandbox space.
This version updates the viewer to use jQuery 2.0.4, adds in the jQuery UI library, and provides enhanced notifications to the user when a path error occurs. When this happens, now the Current Selections div will be highlighted in yellow for a second, rather than printing an onerous message that persists for the remainder of the session.
This version was the first version to feature a functioning viewer. Users can now navigate through the various facets that are used to define the path to calculation images. The top row of buttons shows the facets that correspond to the current path and image displayed. Clicking on any button in the top row defines the choices in the 2nd row, which are used to change the value of the highlighted button in the top row. In this fashion, users can progressively refine the facet values and browse through the plots without having to navigate the complex directory structure.
1: When picking a new value for the dataType or indexGroup facets, the currentSelections buttons do not immediately update to reflect valid subsequent values. After making your new selection, you then have to click on the next facet down the chain to have it update. But once the next button is clicked, the image updates provided the path is valid.
2: The same issue exists when choosing a new indexGroup -- after choosing the new indexGroup, you then have to click on the next facet after indexGroup to have it update. Again, the image gets updated immediately when you click the next facet in the chain.
3: The details of the statistically-downscaled datasets are not yet worked out for 'ncpp'. It is best to avoid this project for now.
4: Some of the Princeton datasets are missing, so the directory structure currently has some dead ends. In such cases, or when a path error occurs, the plot simply won't update.