World Wind Search and Rescue Instructions

Panels and Controls

SAR Application Frame

There are three panels in the application:

A menu bar and a tool bar located at the top of the window provide access to the application functions, tools and options. See Menu bar description and Tool bar description below.

Menu bar description

From left to right:

Tool bar description

SAR Tollbar

From left to right:

Track Management

Loading and saving tracks

Managing track points

A track is made of a list of points each with a geographic position and altitude. Track points are displayed and managed in the track panel on the left of the graphic window. Any field of the displayed list can be edited by double-clicking it and entering a new value. New points can be added, inserted or deleted via the context menu (right-click menu).

SAR Track Panel Context Menu

To add a position to the current track, right click on the track panel and select "Append New Position to Track" in the context menu. A new track point is added to the track with the same location and altitude as the previous point if there is one. Double click on the new point latitude, longitude or altitude to edit the values.

To remove a track point, first click on the corresponding row in the list to select it, then right click and choose the "Delete Selected Position" option in the context menu.

In a similar way, new positions can be inserted before or after the selected row.

The "Add Offset to Selected Positions" option will increment or decrement the selected points altitude of the current track offset value - at top right of the track panel.

Track extension

New track points can also be added by visualy placing them in the graphic window.

SAR Track Extension Tools

To activate one of the three extension modes, click on the corresponding icon in the tool bar - the other two icons become 'disabled', use the tool to add new track points, then click again on the icon in the tool bar to deactivate the extension mode.

SAR Track Extension Plane

While an extension mode is active, the last track point can be removed by clicking on the "Remove last track point" icon in the tool bar.

View Modes

SAR View Modes

The three view modes allow you to explore tracks in different ways:

Terrain Profile

To bring up the terrain profile control window, either:

SAR Terrain Profile

The top-left 'pulldown' menu lets you set the terrain profile graph size to "Small", "Medium" or "Large".

The top-right 'pulldown' menu in the terrain profile panel determines the terrain cross section position. The yellow line in the graphics window shows the cross section's current position. At all times the terrain profile displays the elevations of the terrain intersected by this line. The "Profile at/under..." selection can have the following values:

Terrain Profile Controls

The following controls let you adjust the terrain profile size and behavior:

Anytime, one graph or the other can be either 'minimized' - and becomes an icon, or 'maximized' - it will then fill the whole screen, by clicking on the + and - buttons in the upper right corner of each graph display.

Cloud contour

To activate and control the cloud contour visualization either:

SAR Cloud Contour

This brings up a separate window that lets you turn the visualization on and off, and control the cloud ceiling. To set up a cloud layer at a given altitude, follow these steps:

To add a second cloud layer type an altitude delta value in the "Delta" text field and press "Enter". This will activate a second cloud layer above the first one at the base altitude. To have the second layer below the base altitude, select the "-" radio button. To have one layer below and the other above the base altitude, select the "+/-" radio button. To remove the second layer, enter a zero delta value.

To turn off the cloud contour visualization, uncheck the "Show contour" check box.

Advanced options

Clicking on the "Advanced..." label will unveil additional controls that let you determine around what track segments the clouds are displayed and their appearance.

Annotations

Text annotations can be added at any place on the terrain surface. To add a new annotation follow these steps:

To edit an annotation, double click on it, edit the text in the dialog window that comes up and click the "Save" button.

To remove an annotation either double click on it and then click the "Delete" button in the dialog window, or click on the annotation once to select it (its border becomes yellow) and then select the Annotation->Remove Annotation menu option (or use the keyboard shortcut Alt-A).

To move an annotation first click once on it to select it - its border becomes yellow, and then click again and move it around while keeping the left mouse button down. To deselect the annotation click once on the terrain or select another annotation.

Viewing Controls

Mouse

Keyboard

Bulk download

To work offline (with no network connection) or to speedup imagery and terrain loading, you may want to pre-load imagery and elevation data for a selected area.

CAUTION: trying to download imagery and elevations for a large area will likely involve large amounts of data which will result in both extended time to fetch the files from the servers and large disk space to store them. The Bulk Download panel provides an estimated data size for the selected sector and layers.

To download imagery or elevation data follow these steps:

Each download process will retreive the requested data from the appropriate servers at it's own pace. Once a process has finished it's progress bar will indicate 100% and the "Cancel" button will turn into a green "Remove" button. Clicking the "Remove" button will remove the finished process from the list but will not affect the downloaded data.

At any time a layer download process can be canceled by clicking on the "Cancel" button. Be aware that once canceled a process cannot be restarted unless a similar sector is selected, the corresponding layer is checked and a new download is initiated - which can be done while other process are currently downloading data.

Caution: depending on the network and server condition at the time of the download, some data may not be retrieved properly. This may result in a process ending with a less the 100% progress. In that case the "Cancel" button will turn into an orange "Remove" button. If you think some data are missing, restart download processes for a similar sector and the relevant layers. If most of the data has already been downloaded retrieving the missing portions should be fast.

While download is proceeding the Bulk Download control window can be minimized. Attempting to close the window while downloads are active will bring up a dialog window inquiering whether you want to cancel all downloads.

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