Announcement: SeaDAS 5.3 now available

[obdaac_forum_user]

Announcement: SeaDAS 5.3 is now available.

IMPORTANT: We are not yet able to support Solaris for this release
because our source code has finally exceeded the capabilities of our
outdated Solaris compilers. We are attempting to upgrade to Solaris
10 and are working on getting the code to build with Solaris gcc and
gfortran. We hope to release support for Solaris 10 as soon as possible.

==========================================================================
SeaDAS 5.3 - Release Notes (12/11/08)
==========================================================================

Major Changes from SeaDAS 5.2:

* Updated the following processing programs:

l1bgen 5.8.9
l2gen 5.8.9
l3bin 2.19
l1agen_seawifs 4.5
l1brsgen 5.8.9

See http://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov (/seadas/versions.html) for a table of all
program versions.

* Added new capability to load and display MERIS 1.2km Level-2 products with
navigation information. See the bottom of these release notes for details.

* New MERIS Level-2 demo files are now available from our ftp site:

ftp://samoa.gsfc.nasa.gov/seadas/seadas/seadas_demo_meris.tar.gz

* Added MODIS bl2map and bl3map IDL commands and GUI functions for map
projecting multiple files at once (previously these only worked for SeaWiFS).

* Consolidated l1brsgen into one generic program for all sensors.

* Fixed a bug in l2extract that affected MODIS, CZCS, and OCTS data.

* Added the no-connect track points option back to the Ship Track Function.

* Added a half-kilometer bin resolution option for the l2bin IDL command and GUI.

* Added a 1 degree and 1/10 degree resolution option for the smigen IDL command
and GUI function.

* The l2gen IDL command and GUI function will now automatically set ctl_pt_incr=1
for SeaWiFS, CZCS, and OCTS extracts.

* Added an 8-element limit option for the IDL bl2map command.

* Fixed a bug with colorbar increment changes.

* Modified the smigen IDL command to take a text argument for resolution instead
of an integer value.

* Various other minor bug fixes.

* Changed ancillary scripts to fetch data from oceans.gsfc.nasa.gov instead of
samoa.gsfc.nasa.gov.

* New Aqua and Terra calibration LUTs.

---
NOTES REGARDING MERIS SUPPORT:

This release includes support for the loading and display of MERIS Reduced
Resolution Geophysical Product files (Level-2, 1.2km resolution) in the Envisat
N1 format (see below). Loading MERIS files can now be accomplished in the same
manner as for other sensors via the GUI or the IDL 'load' command. Once loaded,
all SeaDAS functions can be applied to the data (e.g. coastline, map projection,
user defined operations, data export) with the exception of the Level 2 Flags
Display function to be added in the near future. The capability to load Full
Resolution (300m) MERIS data is also planned for a future release. It is also
anticipated that ESA and NASA will work together to provide for the ability to
process MERIS Level-1b data to Level-2 at some time in the future.

MERIS files in the supported Envisat N1 format are distributed via ESA's MERCI
website: https://ats-merci-ds.eo.esa.int/merci/welcome.do (access is provided free
of charge after a simple registration.

We'd like to extend our thanks for the support received from ESA
(https://earth.esa.int/eogateway) and to Brockmann Consult for the
C-library with source code for reading Envisat data products (epr_api-2.0.5,
28.10.2004 available here: http://www.brockmann-consult.de/beam/downloads.html).

Enjoy,

The SeaDAS Development Group