What is VAPOR?
VAPOR stands for Visualization and Analysis Platform for Ocean, Atmosphere, and Solar Researchers. It is a software system providing an interactive 3D visualization environment that runs on most UNIX, Windows and Mac systems equipped with modern 3D graphics cards.
The home of the software is https://www.vapor.ucar.edu.
How to use VAPOR with Metview?
VAPOR has its own internal data model and NWP data has to be converted into the VAPOR format. There are a set of VAPOR command line tools that can convert NetCDF input data into this format but there is no such tool available for GRIB.
Metview's VAPOR Prepare icon helps to overcome this difficulty and allows converting GRIB data into the VAPOR format.
Once the conversion has been completed the VAPOR Prepare icon can be used to start up VAPOR to provide interactive 3D visualisation for the data. The snapshots below show how ECMWF data is actually displayed in VAPOR.
Further details
There is a tutorial available on the use of VAPOR with Metview. It explains both the data preparation steps and the basics of the visualisation.