E3SM Site View

The SiteView UI presents an ARM observatory as a candidate location for in-depth analysis of simulation results. It extracts the E3SM atmosphere (EAM) columns around a site of interest and lets you explore how their fields evolve in space and time.

Features

• Guided setup: pick the site (from the ARM user facilities or any latitude/longitude), the radius of the region of interest and the fields to load.

• 3D view of the selected columns with toggleable layers: clouds, vertical scaling, surface, volume, horizontal and vertical slices, find data, histogram, column cropping and probes. The view can be saved as an image.

• Column heatmap showing a field over vertical levels and time for a given column.

• Cell time charts comparing one or more fields across several columns over time.

• Heatmaps and charts can be downloaded.

• Time animation with play/pause and step controls across all the loaded files.

• Light and dark themes.

License

This library is open source and follows the Apache Software License. See LICENSE for details.

Installation

SiteView requires Python 3.12 or newer.

pip install e3sm-siteview

Input data

SiteView reads E3SM atmosphere (EAM) output in NetCDF format:

• --cf: the connectivity file describing the horizontal mesh (SCRIP/TEMPEST format, e.g. connectivity_ne30pg2_TEMPEST.scrip.nc). Both global and regional meshes are supported, as long as they match the data files.

• --df: one or more EAM history files (e.g. *.eam.h1.*.nc) holding the fields to explore. When several files are given, each one gets its own panel and they all share a single time control. The time steps are read from the first file only: all the files are assumed to share the same time steps.

Running the application

e3sm-siteview --cf ../data/connectivity.nc --df ../data/file_1.nc [...] ../data/file_n.nc

For example, with a regional dataset:

e3sm-siteview \
    --cf data/regional/connectivity_ne30pg2_170e_to_230e_55n_to_85n_TEMPEST.nc \
    --df data/regional/v2_F20TR_nc00_ndgAllLevs_pd.eam.h1.2008-07-*.nc

By default a browser tab opens on the application. Useful options:

Run e3sm-siteview --help for the full list of options.

Keyboard shortcuts

Once the data is loaded, the following shortcuts are available (they are ignored while typing in a field or when a setup dialog is open).

Development setup

We recommend using uv for setting up and managing a virtual environment for your development.

# Create venv and install all dependencies
uv sync --all-extras --dev

# Activate environment
source .venv/bin/activate

# Install commit analysis
pre-commit install
pre-commit install --hook-type commit-msg

For running tests and checks, you can run nox.

# run all
nox

# lint
nox -s lint

# tests
nox -s tests

Examples

The examples directory contains standalone scripts that use the bundled EAM VTK readers (e3sm_siteview.io) directly, without the UI: reading the mesh and column data, building the 3D column volume, selecting columns within a radius and extracting time series.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.rst for how to contribute and CHANGELOG.md for the release history.

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