Re: Improved plotting of DOUBLE data

[luthi(at)aura.ethz.ch (Martin LUETHI GL A8.1 2-4092)]

Liam

You are perfectly right that the plot_dbl works well together with the
oplot_dbl procedure. But this only solves the problem for oplot, but not for
contour, surface aso. Since there would be no difficulty implementig this in
the style of oplot_dbl, it would take me at least one day of tedious work and
I think that this is, why we pay licenses to VNI or RSI.

One thing I would like to point out again: These plotting behaviour has been
known since 1995 by the technical staff at VNI/RSI who provided the
workarounds you mentioned (see the procedure header!). Since then three major
versions of PV-Wave have been released but the bug remains unnoticed by most
users (including me, who always trusted the plots produced by PV-Wave). How
many scientific results were misinterpreted due to inaccuracies in the
plotting routines?

By the way I don't think that the limitation of the plotting routines stems
from the use of single precision floats alone, but also from some basic design
flaws of these plotting routines. These errors manifest themselves in the
sometimes weird behaviour of plotting on date/time axes.

I would really like to see some plot/oplot/contour procedures which always
work, and be it the workarounds of plot_dbl, oplot_dbl, surface_dbl (yet
inexistent) ... 

Cheers

Martin

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Martin Luethi			Tel. +41 1 632 40 92
Glaciology Section		Fax. +41 1 632 11 92
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