1. CERES Data Management Team
view_hdf
Kam-Pui Lee, SAIC
CERES Data Management Team
Linda Hunt, CSC
NASA Langley DAAC
HDF-EOS Workshop II
September 22, 1998

2. Introduction
* NASA Langley Research Center has developed the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) instrument to study the Earth's climate and environment
* The CERES Data Management System has been developed by the Atmospheric Sciences Division to generate science data products from the instrument measurements
* This system is now operational at the Langley Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) producing archival data sets written in Hierarchical Data Format (HDF)

3. * A visualization and analysis tool (view_hdf) has been written in Interactive Data Language (IDL) to access data from HDF products
* This tool is developed on a UNIX platform with a graphical user interface (GUI) to manipulate the data
* User does not need any knowledge of HDF
* view_hdf has been tested on Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX and DEC Alpha operating systems

4. Capabilities of view_hdf
* Select and subset variables from either Science Data Sets (SDS) or Vdata structures
* Render both two and three dimensional graphics
* Plot geolocated data onto various world map projections
* Plot multiple variables
* Plot difference of two variables
* Compute statistics
* Create subset of data based on the range of another criterion variable
* Display data from the screen
* Save plot in Postscript or GIF format
* Send plot directly to a printer
* Export data to a file in ASCII format

5. User's Guide
* The URL for the draft User's Guide to view_hdf is:
(will be relocated at the DAAC when final version is available)
Contacts for Data Center/Data Access Information and view_hdf program:
Langley DAAC User and Data Services Office
NASA Langley Research Center
Mail Stop 157D
2 South Wright Street
Hampton, VA
USA
Telephone: (757)
FAX: (757)
URL: