Terrenus Earth Sciences

Resources

Image and Data Sources

NRCan Earth Sciences
NOAA CLASS Archive
GOES data from NOAA
GOES data from NASA
Natural Earth
ESRI Open Data
National Data Buoy Center (NDBC)
National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC)
National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI) Satellite Data Access
NASA Rapid Response
NASA Earth Observatory
Global Change Master Directory
CelesTrak satellite tracking data
NASA Ocean Color Web
NOAA Ocean Products

Data Formats

GeoTIFF Specification
NOAA Polar Orbiter Data User's Guides
Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) Group
HDF-EOS Tools
Network Common Data Form (netCDF)
NetCDF CF Metadata Conventions

Processing and Viewing Software

NASA SeaDAS
ESA SNAP common architecture
HDFView
The Generic Mapping Tools (GMT)
MapServer
WXtoIMG APT processing
PyTROLL project

Software Development Libraries

iText Java PDF Library
CONREC contour plotting algorithm
NOAA Scientific Graphics Toolkit (SGT)
Java Matrix Package (JAMA)
Java OpenJUMP mapping platform
Java JArgs command line parsing
GeoTools Open Source Java GIS Toolkit
PROJ C language coordinate transform library
UDUNITS C language units conversion library
NetCDF Java library
HDF Java library
Java Expressions Library (JEL)

Technical Notes

U of Colorado Coordinate Systems Overview
U of Colorado Geodetic Datum Overview
U of Colorado Map Projections Overview
Satellite Times: Orbital Coordinate Systems
Prof Ing. Diotallevi Gianfranco Notes on Cartography
Wolfram MathWorld article on ellipsoid equations
Rocket & Space Technology article on orbital mechanics
Standard Molodensky Datum Transform in Java by Chuck Taylor

Getting Earth Imagery

Much of the image data collected by earth-observing satellites is made available to the public free of charge. Some data are available as GIF or JPEG images to be viewed in a web browser, while other data are in scientific data formats such as HDF and require special software to view.

Software Development

Many open-source libraries are available to help developers with geographic data manipulation, plotting, and conversion. The technical notes on this page are useful for developers who want to create their own satellite data processing software.