DView

DView displays hourly time series data in a variety of formats. We developed DView for NREL to help with the visual analysis of all kinds of hourly time series data, with a particular emphasis on "typical meteorological year" data. DView opens text files and Excel files containing any type of hourly data, and it recognizes several particular file formats, including TMY2, TMY3, and EPW files.

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Formats

DView displays data in a variety of graphical formats. The time series graph allows you to turn channels on or off with a single click, and to zoom and pan very easily:

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The DMap (data map) format displays a whole year of data at once, with the day of the year on the x-axis and time of day on the y-axis, so that each time step corresponds to a small rectangle. That rectangle gets assigned a color based on the value in that time step. Using this format, it is possible to identify both diurnal and seasonal patterns. The example below shows the direct normal solar radiation in Boulder, Colorado from the TMY2 data set. The image shows that the days are longer in the summer than in the winter, the most intense direct radiation values tend to occur in the spring and fall, and summer afternoons tend to be cloudy:

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Comparing Data Sets

One of DView"s most useful features is its ability to graphically compare two or three data sets. You can compare the data in a time series graph...

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... or in the DMap format:

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You can also compare data in a monthly box plot:

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