SeaDAS 6.3 Released

[OB.DAAC - SeanBailey]

==========================================================================
SeaDAS 6.3 - Release Notes (11/2011)
http://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/seadas/
==========================================================================

SeaDAS 6.3 includes a number of bug fixes for the SeaDAS GUI interface.
Additionally, all of the processing scripts have been written in python. These
python scripts replace the CSH scripts distributed with previous versions of
SeaDAS. The CSH scripts are no longer supported.

Supported platforms for this release are:

- Linux
- Linux x86_64
- Intel Macintosh OS X 10.5/10.6
(PowerPC Macintosh platforms are no longer supported, however the source code
should still compile and run on these systems)

New requirements:
- python version 2.6 or above in the 2.x series is require for data
processing (2.7 is preferred) - if you need to upgrade, see:
http://www.python.org/download/releases

Added features:
- l1mapgen, l1brsgen, l2mapgen and l2brsgen now all use consistent
command-line arguments and can output PNG files directly

Modified directory structure:

- the processing code directory tree ($SEADAS/run) now includes
architecture specific directories for the bin directories
(e.g. $SEADAS/run/bin/linux; $SEADAS/run/bin/linux_64)
Any user-defined scripts that use these binaries directly may need to be
modified accordingly. The $OCSSW_BIN environment variable can be used.
When sourcing the $SEADAS/config/seadas.env, the $PATH environment will
have $OCSSW_BIN appended to it.

Modified scripts:
- modis_L1A.csh is replaced by modis_L1A.py
- modis_GEO.csh is replaced by modis_GEO.py
- modis_L1B.csh is replaced by modis_L1B.py
- modis_L1A_extract.csh is replaced by modis_L1A_extract.py
- modis_definitive_atteph.csh and modis_predicted_atteph scripts are
replaced by modis_atteph.py
- modis_geocheck.csh is replaced by modis_geocheck.py
- modis_update_luts.csh, modis_update_utcpole_leapsec.csh and
seawifs_update_elements_orbit.csh are replaced by update_luts.py

Minor bug fixes:
- lonlat2pixline: corrected a bug that affected MODIS L1 file navigation,
resulting in incorrect output for certain conditions
- l2bin: corrected a bug that prevented metadata from being correctly set
- l3bin reader code: modified to allow small variances to be retrieved. A
previous threshold resulted in products with small variances (e.g. Rrs)
to have the values set to zero.
- L3b load routine: corrected to properly recognize MERIS files
- SMI reader: corrected a bug for OCTS in that it used incorrect hard-coded
values for the scene dimensions. This was updated to use values from the
file metadata.
- modifications of the user PATH environment cleaned up to prevent path
duplication

Code eliminated (no longer used):
- modis_timestamp
- addsecs
- jd2date
- wget (third party code previously distributed by SeaDAS)

Additionally, the ncdump program has changed. We have made modifications to the
processing code I/O routines to allow native access to netCDF files. To accomplish this,
the netCDF library is now included in the processing code, which necesitated the removal
of netCDF support from the HDF4 libraries. So, the ncdump binary is now the netCDF
version and the ncdump_hdf is the HDF4 version. If you previously made use of the
ncdump distributed with SeaDAS to retrieve information about HDF4 files, you will need
to now use the ncdump_hdf binary.

Enjoy,

The SeaDAS Development Group