HDF Mapping? [was: netCDF to color GEOTIFF]

[Norman Barker]

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU]On
Behalf Of Sage Lichtenwalner
Sent: Friday, December 02, 2005 4:52 PM
To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] HDF Mapping? [was: netCDF to color
GEOTIFF]


Andrea et al.,

This is an intriguing solution, and it raises the question: if you can plot raster data using netCDF
data files then can you also use HDF files in the same way?  Provided, of course, that GDAL is
compiled with HDF support.

I was hoping to try this out myself, but I spent all yesterday trying to compile HDF4 on Mac OS X
to no avail.  So my other question is, has anyone had any luck compiling HDF4?

Like many of you, I suspect, my ultimate goal is to be able to plot SST (and eventually Chl-a, etc.)
using MapServer, but I can't figure out the best way to approach the problem.  Any guidance
anyone might have would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a bunch,

Sage
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<snip>

Hi Sage,

well gdalinfo --formats shows

  HDF5 (ro): Hierarchical Data Format Release 5
  HDF5Image (ro): HDF5 Dataset

so it is possible, but in the same way as the reading netCDF from disk it will not allow HDF as an output format.  If you just want a portrayal (PNG, JPEG etc) then this isn't a problem.

To me (and I guess to others on the list), it depends on what you want to do with your data.  Do you just want to portray your data, so as to give a quick look, if so then a WMS is fine.

If you want to serve temporal collections of HDF data then you perhaps might want to look at the MapServer Web Coverage Service, there are a growing number of analysis clients available for this.  In particular NWGISS (http://nwgiss.laits.gmu.edu/) has been doing this for a long time.  I would recommend you try MapServer first though, it is open source, and very easy to set up to serve temporal collections.

Please mail if you need any help.

Norman