HDF Mapping? [was: netCDF to color GEOTIFF]

[Sage Lichtenwalner]

Hi Norman,

As best I can tell, when you compile GDAL it loads in HDF4, HDF5 or netCDF support only if
they've already been installed on your system (meaning they're not included in the GDAL
source distribution).  Unfortunately, all the data at my disposal is in HDF4 format, which
required some investigating in order to get it to compile on Mac OS X (namely specifying  the
--without-fortran tag).  And from what I understand, there's a big issue in trying to get all
three to compile together nicely, but I don't need to worry about that (yet).

But the good news is, for anyone who's interested and didn't already know, you can indeed
plot HDF4 data directly using MapServer.  Special thanks to Andrea for sharing a nice way of
"coloring" the data.

Of course, just because I've gotten it to plot AVHRR SST HDF4 files, doesn't mean I've gotten
the projection correct.  So that's my challenge for this week.

As for the WMS/WCS, I'm a data visualizer, not a data manager, so plots are my first priority.
I'll leave it to those more skilled at DM figure out how to support a WCS.  After all, that's one
of the big tasks of the up-and-coming Ocean Observation Regional Associations.  And we
have to leave them something to do ;)

Cheerio,

Sage
--------------------------------------------------
Sage Lichtenwalner
Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
71 Dudley Road, New Brunswick, NJ 08901
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On Fri, 2 Dec 2005 17:34:21 -0000, Norman Barker <nbarker at RSINC.COM> wrote:
>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