Whilst some data formats (e.g. GRIB) can be straightforward to visualise because their contents are quite constrained and their meta-data is standardised, this is not true for all formats; for example, netCDF or ASCII tables can contain many types of data which could be plotted in various ways.
In order to allow visualisation of these formats, Metview has a set of visualiser icons, one for each data type: netCDF, ODB, ASCII table and direct input lists. In each case, the first question is what the data represents, e.g. points or matrix; in a geographical or x/y coordinate system. After this has been chosen, the rest of the available parameters can be filled in, thus giving enough information to plot the data. The visualiser icon can then be visualised via its context menu, producing a default plot for the data. The plot may be further customised by using appropriate view and visual definition icons.
Dates should be strings formatted as "YYYY-MM-DD"; a time can optionally be specified like this: "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS".