Contour Animation

This example shows how to create 2D colored contour animation from series of SWMF outputs using Matplotlib.

The exported animate method from the BatsrusPyPlotExt extension provides a convenient way to do this. It automatically handles:

• Time-dependent titles.
• Tweakable colorbars.
• Plotting streamlines on top of colored contours by correctly dispatching a streamline into lines and arrows and removing them iteratively frame by frame.
• Consistent colors across frames: if vmin/vmax are not given, all snapshots are scanned for a global color range (frames are cached during the scan, so each file is only read once).
• AMR-aware sampling: with the default plotinterval = nothing, the finest grid resolution is auto-detected from the first snapshot (see finest_resolution), which avoids oversampling or undersampling AMR and unstructured output.
• Automatic colormap: bipolar data gets a symmetric RdBu_r scale, non-negative data gets turbo. Override with colormap or plot_kwargs.

using Batsrus, PyPlot

filedir = "GM/"

files = filter(file -> startswith(file, "z") && endswith(file, ".out"), readdir(filedir))
# Generate full paths for files
files = joinpath.(filedir, files)

var = "bz"
streamvars = "bx;by"
outdir = "out/"

# vmin/vmax and the colormap are determined automatically; bipolar data such as
# bz gets a symmetric RdBu_r color scale consistent across all frames.
animate(
    files; var, outdir, streamvars,
    stream_kwargs = (; color = "white", density = 1),
    cbar_kwargs = (; orientation = "vertical", extend = "both")
)

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