Graphical capability display

[axch]

The first thing that one's eyes fall upon when visiting http://mitgcm.org/ are a set of colorful, reasonably high resolution graphics, presumably rendered from model results. This makes it instantly clear what kind of thing MITgcm is, and to the discerning eye presumably serves as a fast and compelling ad of its effectiveness (in trained hands, perhaps). Methinks Aronnax's appeal will be much enhanced by including such a graphic in the main landing page (which is currently the Sphinx docs index). What would be an appropriate graphic, and what needs to happen to produce it?

Desiderata

• Concrete (i.e., rendering the simulated ocean somehow, not some abstract line plot)
• Visually attractive (tastefully chosen colors, high resolution)
• Recognizable (a standard visualization from the field would be great, if there are any that meet the other criteria)
• Distinctive (ideally, makes the isopycnal nature of Aronnax immediately evident)

Nice to have

• In-depth explanation of what it actually is
• Maybe a user tutorial on reproducing it

[edoddridge]

This is a good idea. I think we can use some plots of the reproductions for this purpose. The simulations will likely take too long to spin up from rest on Travis-CI, but if we check in a pickup file the simulation could be restarted from there, some output produced and then a pretty picture made from that output, all within a reasonable amount of run time.

This approach would require minimal extra effort, since we already want to include some examples that reproduce published work.

[edoddridge]

As to what the graphic should be, I think a 3D plot in which the layer interfaces are plotted, and perhaps coloured according to some other variable, would be visually appealing, and immediately display that this model works in isopycnal layers.