Visualization enhancements

This issue is to collect priorities and preferences for our visualization pipeline (and should be moved to one centralized viz repo). @simonbyrne hope this will be helpful for the design.

Requirements

focusing on the GCM setup, we need to have an efficient and easy-to-use pipeline to visualize basic variables, and be able to compare them with reanalysis and other ESM output, effectively showing the errors between them.

Basic variables

Temporal (monthly) means and zonal means of zonal wind, temperature, potential temperature (and selected other variables such as temperature variance, eddy kinetic energy)
Lat-Lon plots of precip, cloud cover, TOA energy fluxes (LW, SW, net), pressure (on z surfaces) also monthly means
Energy spectra

Current ClimaAtmos postprocessing (lead by @jiahe23 )

extracting GCM variables (this can be done online or offline):
- https://github.com/CliMA/ClimaAtmos.jl/blob/main/examples/hybrid/sphere/remap_pipeline.jl
plotting
- https://github.com/CliMA/ClimaAtmos.jl/blob/main/examples/hybrid/define_post_processing.jl

Other datasets

ERA-5 Reanalysis - we have a julia pipeline for extracting this data (@LenkaNovak can help)
CMIP6 models

Missing features

interpolation from height onto pressure surfaces (and later also potential temperature surfaces)
flexible visualization tool with
- interactive sliders (slide along latitude, longitude, pressure, time axes)
- map overlay (we have played around with Geomakie, but found some potential plotting bugs)
- capability to do simple operations such as mean, variance, custom operations / scalings (similar to Paraview's calculator)
- ability to perform manipulations of fields loaded from different files
- GPU capability?
online accumulation of monthly means and variances (implementable in individual models - e.g. ClimaAtmos)
double check that energy spectra are still working (@jiahe23 @akshaysridhar have recent version of this)
- 1D: zonal wavenumber vs latitude using fft only
- 2D: zonal wavenumber vs total wavenumber using a spherical harmonics transform

Other less urgent features

2d Gaussian smoothing
ability to zoom in/out in Makie, extract values of a particular point with a cursor
quiver plots
@sandreza may be able to share his histograms to visualize errors / uncertainty
3d visualization and interactive rotation (we had a version of this but it probably need to be updated)
time interpolation (for smoother animations)
generalizable to other model components

Other comments

our raw model output will soon be hdf5 files. The above postprocessing scripts will need to be updated in ~2 weeks

Tagging @tapios @jiahe23 @szy21 @akshaysridhar @bischtob @yairchn for more input of what you think would be useful given your experience with visualizing GCM data.

References

https://pcmdi.llnl.gov/mips/amip/OUTPUT/AMIP2/outlist.html

CliMA / ClimaCoupler.jl

Visualization enhancements #107