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Earth sciences graphics software is a plotting and image processing software used in atmospheric sciences,
meteorology
Meteorology is a branch of the atmospheric sciences (which include atmospheric chemistry and physics) with a major focus on weather forecasting. The study of meteorology dates back millennia, though significant progress in meteorology did no ...
, climatology, oceanography and other
Earth science
Earth science or geoscience includes all fields of natural science related to the planet Earth. This is a branch of science dealing with the physical, chemical, and biological complex constitutions and synergistic linkages of Earth's four sphere ...
disciplines.
Earth sciences graphics software includes the capability to read specialized data formats such as
netCDF
NetCDF (Network Common Data Form) is a set of software libraries and self-describing, machine-independent data formats that support the creation, access, and sharing of array-oriented scientific data. The project homepage is hosted by the Unidat ...
GRIB
GRIB (GRIdded Binary or General Regularly-distributed Information in Binary form) is a concise data format commonly used in meteorology to store historical and forecast weather data. It is standardized by the World Meteorological Organization's C ...
. Such software is sometimes able to access the data from remote data centers. Examples of applications include satellite data processing, analysis of output from complex meteorological models and display of time series of data. Graphics capabilities range from simple line plots, to complex three-dimensional visualizations.
This type of graphics software is often used to display results from earth sciences numerical models.