20010504: McIDAS and Matlab (cont.)

>From: Jason Law <address@hidden>
>Organization: USF
>Keywords: 200104271911.f3RJBFL16947 McIDAS Matlab

Jason,

>Thank you for getting back to me so quickly.

You are welcome.

>I am in the process
>of getting McIDAS installed, but I have a question.  Is there anyway to
>read McIDAS image area format files into Matlab?

As I noted in one of my previous emails, I have no experience with
MatLab, so I don't know if someone out there has written procedures to
import satellite imagery in McIDAS AREA format into it.  I did notice
that you sent your request for information to the mcidas-x email list.
This is what I would have recommended as a next step.  I would also
check to see if there are any references to McIDAS AREA format in any
of the MatLab news groups.

>I am attemptng to access
>some sea surface temperature that is in the image area format and ideally
>I would like to be able to read it into Matlabfor processing.

Will MatLab be able to understand the navigation of the data in the
images?  Getting the values for each pixel is one thing; navigating
them is another.

>Each image
>has to be processed and I need to make weekly composites of the hourly
>images that I have.

Compositing the images is one of the things that is easily done in
McIDAS.  What exactly is the processing that you need to do?  It could
well be that you can do all of your work in McIDAS, so you wouldn't
need to worry about MatLab at all.

>Naturally that is a lot of processing time.  I don't
>know if you are familiar with HDF format,

Yes, some.

>but I have used that and there
>are existing Matlab routines that handle HDF (which seems very similar to
>McIDAS format) but I have been unable to find anything regarding Matlab
>and McIDAS.

Actually, the HDF and AREA formats can be quite different in the small
things.

>Any advice you can give me is greatly apppreciated, I have
>nearly 7 years of hourly data on tape and I need to reduce the data volume
>somehow.  Thank you.

Unfortunately, I can't help you with MatLab, but I can help you use
McIDAS to do what you need.

As I noted in my previous email, at a minimum you can use McIDAS to
convert the format of the images into netCDF, and then use MatLab to
process the netCDF data (I think).

Tom