elevation and bathymetric data

[Malcolm Williamson]

On Wed, 30 Apr 1997, Bart C. Bautista wrote:

> Dear Grass Users,
> 
>       I am new to this list and I have plans to download and intall
> GRASS to my LINUX system. I have been following this list for about 5
> months now  and my impression is that GRASS still has many problems and
> bugs which will be very frustrating for someone who does not have enough
> background in UNIX and in programming. Before I plunge into the
Hi, Bart
I have to make some comments on your above statement, for the benefit of 
any other "newbies" that are reading this list. 99% of the GRASS 
"problems" that I see on this list fall into one of two categories: 
either it is a compiling problem, or what I will call a workflow problem 
(how do I accomplish goal x?). The first results from having source code 
that can be compiled under virtually any flavor of UNIX (or clone), which 
is not recommended for UNIX beginners. Compiled binaries are available 
for the most common operating systems. From my point of view, free source 
code is a good thing, not a detriment

The second issue, that of appropriate "workflow", does reflect one of 
GRASS' fundamental problems: lack of support. This is one of those situations 
when you truly get what you pay for. Since you didn't spend a nickel on 
the software, you don't explicitly get any support! How to resolve this 
problem? Well, you've obviously hit upon one of the major resources, this 
list/newsgroup. However, you're at the mercy of other people's good will 
when you ask for help here. Another option is to take short courses; 
ourselves and others offer such courses. Lastly, there are some people 
that offer contracted support for GRASS.

As far as true bugs go, GRASS is one of the most robust raster-based GIS 
packages out there. Period. It doesn't complain about files of ridiculous 
size, and there are no surprises in the results. I've worked with many 
other packages, and I keep on reverting to GRASS when I actually want to 
get things done.

Obviously, this is _my_ opinion!

> wonderful world of frustrations, I would like to know first if my main
> objective will be met by using GRASS. I recently acquired 30sec X 30sec
> elevation and bathymetric data from the EDC-DAAC of the USGS which I
> intend to use in my research. The documentation states that the data

I'm not familiar with this particular data. If someone else doesn't end 
up helping you with this, write me back and I'll look into it further. It 
_shouldn't_ be a problem to get it into GRASS.
--
Malcolm D. Williamson - GIS Specialist           E-mail: malcolm at cast.uark.edu
Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies      Telephone: (501) 575-6159
Ozark Rm. 12                                        Fax: (501) 575-5218 
University of Arkansas              
Fayetteville, AR 72701

> format is readable by ARCINFO. Since I could not afford to use this
> software because it's too expensive, I would like to know if there is
> anyone from this group who has had experience in reading this type of
> data on GRASS. I would be very thankful to anyone who will answer my
> inquiry.
> 
> BART BAUTISTA
> Dept. of Earth and Plannetary Sciences
> Kyoto University
> Sakyoku, Kyoto 606
> JAPAN
>