Hi.
I'm working on the NOAA NCDC CDR program, and my first task is to
develop a production system for creating a lower-level product than the
one you are describing for this prototype. The product will be the NPP
VIIRS instrument data, uncompressed and organized according to
resolution and band, along with the ephemeris and attitude data needed
to do geolocation. There will be no conversion to engineering or
science units, and no geolocation of the pixels. (We plan on doing
sufficient geolocation to identify the swath envelope.) We are planning
on storing this data in netCDF-4 format. This product will then be used
to produce higher-level products, and will be archived for later use (as
an aid to reprocessing higher-level products with modified algorithms or
calibration data, for example).
While such a data product won't be directly usable in visualization
packages and such, I would prefer to organize the data in a way that
comes as close as possible to matching existing conventions. Since we
will not have physical units to associate with any dimensions other than
band and time, I'm wondering what is the best approach to take. Is this
level of product too basic to warrant a convention? Do you think the
cf-satellite convention should include guidelines for this level of
data? I'd appreciate any guidance on how to tackle this.
In addition, there are a number of look-up tables that are used in
converting this "raw" data to engineering and science units. Many of
these look-up tables have input indices larger than 1 byte in size.
Many of these are, again, not something standardized software packages
will likely use, and we are presently leaning towards the idea of
creating attributes in the product files that would provide unique
references to files containing the data for the look-up tables. I would
also appreciate any guidance on this topic that people would be willing
to provide.
Lastly (and maybe this should have come first!), if you don't think this
is the correct forum for these questions, please direct me to what you
feel is the proper forum. I'm new to working with netCDF, and I need
all the help I can get.
Grace and peace,
Jim Biard
--
Jim Biard
Government Contractor, STG Inc.
Remote Sensing and Applications Division (RSAD)
National Climatic Data Center
151 Patton Ave.
Asheville, NC 28801-5001
jim.biard@xxxxxxxx
828-257-3006
