coastlines, borders, plate boundary files for specfem models, meshes, and movies

[carltape]

Following our monthly zoom call today, I am uploading a table related to one point:

As the open boxes in the table imply, there is room for improving the archive of accessory files for visualization in paraview, notably coastlines, borders, and plate boundaries. The VTK_Paraview directory contains some scripts and files mentioned in the table. The general procedure seems to be to use GMT to generate delimited lon-lat values for user-specified resolution. Then convert these files to xyz, which may require specifying an ellipsoid. (My understanding is that the global code uses WGS84.) That stage also requires specifying an elevation for the lon-lat coastlines or borders. Borders cannot be set to zero elevation, since in most cases they would be below the topography. But potentially any upward translation (say, to 5 km elevation) could be handled in paraview by increasing the x-y-z scale factor. (In an ideal scenario, the lon-lat files would drape on top of whatever domain is shown.) There is room for others to contribute on this item, and certain updates would be great to have also in the cartesian version. Thank you.