For this tutorial, we assume that you have a simulation running, and it is properly using the high-performance GPU on your system. Ideally, you have worked through or reviewed the previous tutorials.
Set your simulation to look like the below (viewing the Free Surface Elevation with the Ocean colormap), and open the “Plot Time Series” Panel:
The model allows for time series at up to 15 different locations. This is currently a hard-coded limit. For this example, lets create four different time series. In the “Total Number of Time Series”, select 4.
In the “Duration” input box, the user would add the length of time for the time series to be displayed and then saved. For example, if the user chooses 900 seconds (15 minutes), time series will be saved to disk every 900 seconds of simulation time. If the model runs for 60 minutes, then four separate time series files will be saved. Here, lets use 300 seconds; set the value and click Update.
To specify the time series locations, the user has two options. The x and y coordinates of the desired locations can be added manually using the input boxes, or the user can simply right-click on the desired location on the canvas. For this example, the click approach is used. With “Time Series Location to Update” set to 1, right click on the animation canvas. You will see a light blue dot appear in the location of the click. You can re-click the canvas to move the time series to a different location. Change “Time Series Location to Update” to 2, 3, and 4, and add a location for each time series. The resulting animation should show all 4 time series locations with different colored dots:
Now, the simulation is storing data at these locations.
To see the time series of ocean surface elevation, scroll down on the web page. You will see a “Time Series Plots” header – maximize that window. You should then see a plot that looks like:
All of the time series are plotted together on the same axes. You can toggle the display of time series off and on by clicking on the legend label. For example, by clicking on the Location 2 and Location 3 label, we can toggle off the display of those two time series:
This is useful when a larger number of time series are stored. Also note that the user can hover over and click on the time series to see specific values.
Once the “Duration” is reached and the time series fill the chart, the time series data will be written to file. The files will automatically download into the browsers Downloads directory. Two files are saved, one with the locations of the time series “time_series_locations.txt” and another with the time series data “time_series_data.txt.” Both are regular text files formatted in a typical manner for time series.