Request for help on Py-ART's default colormaps and limits

[Jonathan Helmus]

Py-ART community,

    Currently, when using Py-ART to plot radar data a single colormap (jet) and set of luminosity limits (-6 to 100) is used to generate the plot regardless of the field being visualized.  Specifying the cmap, vmin, and vmax arguments will override these defaults.  This is not an ideal situation.  The same colormap and luminosity limits should not be used for reflectivity data, Doppler velocities and other fields. 

    We would like to change this behavior so that different colormaps and luminosity limits are provided for a number of known radar fields.  For example a "reflectivity" field will be plotted using the "pyart_NWSRef" colormap and limits of -30 to 75 where as a "velocity" field will use the "pyart_NWSVel" colormap with limits given by +/- the Nyquist velocity.  It will still be possible to override these defaults by specifying the cmap, vmin and vmax arguments and these defaults can be customized by adjusting the Py-ART configuration file [1].

    What we would like your help in is deciding on these default colormaps and luminosity limits for the various fields the Py-ART configuration file knows about.  Pull Request #464 [2] has a table of proposed colormaps and limits, if you have an opinion on these please either comment on this pull request or reply to this email thread.  The pyart_colormaps_and_limits repository [3] has plots from a variety of radar for  many of these proposed colormaps and limits.

Cheers,

    - Jonathan Helmus


[1] http://arm-doe.github.io/pyart-docs-travis/user_reference/generated/pyart.load_config.html
[2] https://github.com/ARM-DOE/pyart/pull/464
[3] https://github.com/jjhelmus/pyart_colormaps_and_limits