AVS Modules                                                          mean
copyright  1996   Michael J. Rangitsch                         8 Jan 1996

NAME
      mean - compute the area averaged mean of a 2d scalar field

SUMMARY
      Name        mean

      Type        renderer

      Inputs      field 2D 3-space scalar rectilinear float

      Outputs     real

      Parameters  Mean Value   string block

DESCRIPTION
      This module computes and outputs the area averaged mean of a
      rectilinear scalar field (admittedly a very specialized input).
      The statistics module supplied in AVS only uses the values at
      the cells to compute the mean.  In an irregularly sampled field
      (like the rectilinear field used in this module) the mean of the
      values may not represent the true mean of the field.  By weighting
      the value contributions to the mean by the cell size, a better 
      mean is computed.

      The mean value is output to a port to allow its use in a label 
      module (for annotation purposes).


INPUT
      A rectilinear scalar field (field 2D real 3 space rectilinear)

OUTPUT
      A real value (float)

PARAMETERS
      Mean Value -- The mean computed by the module as a text block

EXAMPLES
      The following network shows a typical usage of mean


        read field         generate colormap
            |                 |
        extract scalar -------|---
            |                 |  |
        othogonal slicer   color range
            |      |          |
            |      ---------  |
          --|--------------|--|
         |  |              |
        field to mesh     mean
               |           |
               |         label
               |           |
               |-----------|
               |
        geometry viewer


This examples uses the mean to generate a label


AVS Module						             mean
Michael J. Rangitsch          				       8 Jan 1996