User interface (GUI)

Technical side

The graphical user interface is relying on PyQt5, a Python port of C++ based Qt5 libraries. Plotting is done via PyQtGraph, a lighweight but powerfull interactive scientific graphics and GUI Library. In addition of these, NumPy, SciPy and matplotlib are used. To read the output of ARCA, it is necessary to have NetCDF4 for Python. Installation of all these modules is covered earlier.

Getting graphical layouts to work on all three main OS (and their variants) is not straightforward. Qt does this job very well, but there are still cases where the user interface becomes unusable. So far these have related to overrides in system screen resolution, and they can be remedied with adjusting the font in the GUI. If you experience problems, please provide information of your OS (Win/Lin/OSX, version and graphics card if possible) and a screenshot of the GUI.

Starting the GUI

To start the model, use the terminal (native on Linux and Mac, Cygwin in Windows) to navigate to ARCA main directory, then type the command:

sh run_arca.sh

(On some systems sh might have to be replaced with bash)

Additionally in Linux the GUI can be started by double clicking the "ARCA box model" icon. How very un-Linux, right?

The GUI will start, and we recommend you arrange the terminal window and the GUI so that both are visible. The terminal is used to show usefull information (and occasional error messages too).