DRILSDOWN

Drawing Rich Integrated Lat-lon-time Samples from Datasets Online into Working Notebooks

Documentation is now at [https://unidata.github.io/drilsdown/]

(image: 4 panel cartoon Explaining DRILSDOWN concept)

Get DRILSDOWN capabilities in three tiers of increasing complexity

1. IDV teleporting. Install The IDV on your screen machine, then use idv_teleport a template bundle to any place+time.

2. IDV+Jupyter: iPython Notebooks interact with your IDV session.

out to the world.

Tier 1. Teleporting the IDV to any place and time:

Install The IDV and our recommended Plugin on your screen machine. Learn the basics of interacting with The IDV, for example from this ppt.

1a. Obtain a template IDV bundle, with visualization displays you like, whose data are from a big aggregated dataset. For instance, this one has global atmospheric reanalyses and satellite data. This ‘template’ can be teleported to your places & cases. For instance, try out this template for some atmospheric data around heavy rain events, by selecting a case from this online atlas.
1b. Teleport by command line: To use a command-line call to teleport your IDV bundle, you could clone a copy of IDV_teleport.py. Follow the directions there, or type python idv_teleport.py -h to get help. Even easier: run pip install drilsdown, and then idv_teleport -h will be a direct command.

Tier 2. Add Jupyter notebooks to the mix

Install Jupyter notebooks on your screen machine, starting here. You can learn more about Notebook technology from Unidata.

2a. To use The IDV within an iPython Jupyter notebook, follow the 4 steps here. From the Notebook, execute %reload_ext drilsdown. Launch an IDV instance (manually or from the widget in the Notebook), and communicate with it from within the Notebook environment, capturing images and animations into the Notebook, and connecting The IDV’s data and display capabilities to your other Python computations. It is clearest to start from an example .ipynb file, like this one.
2b. Alternatively, for IDV development (as opposed to mere use), you can interact with The IDV from a Jupyter notebook with a Jython kernel (IDV’s native language). To do this, install JyIDV, culminating in the command line call of python setup.py install. Follow and extend the example notebooks you can find there.

Tier 3. Run your own RAMADDA server

Perhaps you see the power of RAMADDA from Tiers 1 and 2 and want to operate your own RAMADDA, so you can publish to it, and with it, moving beyond just fetching goodies from someone else’s.

Install RAMADDA on your networked server (or in fact, it can run on your laptop or screen machine too). Among its many other functions, RAMADDA can be used to serve out gridded numerical datasets suitable for IDV access from anywhere. It can also publish and curate IDV bundles, and publish and render Jupyter notebooks.

Obtain the DRILSDOWN plugin for RAMADDA to gain extra services. Special for DRILSDOWN is an entry type called a case study like this. This digital object (symbolized by a briefcase icon) can contain meaningfully linked-together sets of notebooks, IDV bundles, and pre-made images, as well as metadata tags. Your content can be accessed from anywhere, and new services can be developed within RAMADDA to operate on whatever sorts of materials and data you may store in sufficiently-similar Case Studies.