Create README.md

README.md

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+# ncmaps
+**ncmaps brings scientific colormaps to ncview.**
+
+[ncview](http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~pierce/ncview_home_page.html) is a legacy, light-weight netcdf viewer that is still in wide use in the geosciences community.
+
+One of the weak points of ncview is its colormaps (e.g. jet), in particular the lack of *scientific* (*aka perceptually uniform*) colormaps.
+
+**ncmap** adds scientific colormaps to the configuration path of ncview, so that your data can be displayed using *viridis*, *inferno*, *cmocean*, and more.
+
+## Installation
+
+ 1. Fetch the ncmaps repo from github, alternatively copy the ncmaps file;
+ 2. Run ncmaps in the terminal (requires Python3);
+ 3. Define (export) a shell environment variable: `export NCVIEWBASE=${HOME}/.ncmaps`;
+
+New colormaps should be available the next time you run `ncview`.
+
+## Supported colormaps
+*ncmaps* harvests scientific colormaps from the following python modules:
+ * [matplotlib](https://matplotlib.org/stable/tutorials/colors/colormaps.html)
+ * [cmocean](https://matplotlib.org/cmocean/)
+ * [cmcrameri](https://pypi.org/project/cmcrameri/)
+
+These modules must be installed and accessible to your your python implementation (e.g. via *pip* or *conda*) **before** running ncmaps.
+Modules that are not available are skipped.
+
+## Command-line parameters
+
+Running `ncmaps` should be enough in most cases, but check `ncmaps -h`.
+
+## Author
+Thomas Lavergne, Norwegian Meteorological Institute