Earthdata Forum

Hello everyone,

I am working with NASA ocean color datasets and ran into a format issue when trying to use the data in QGIS.

I downloaded several files from the NASA Earthdata Ocean Color portal (for example Kd490 products). The files appear to be in NetCDF (.nc) format. When I attempted to load them directly into QGIS, the layers did not display correctly.

After searching for solutions, I saw that many users recommend using SeaDAS to process or convert these files before using them in GIS software. However, I am not familiar with SeaDAS yet and I am unsure which workflow or tool I should use.

My goal is to:

• Convert the downloaded NASA ocean color files into a format that can be used in QGIS (e.g., GeoTIFF)
• Visualize and analyze the Kd490 values spatially

Could someone please advise:

Which SeaDAS tool or workflow should be used to convert these files?

Whether there is a recommended way to export them to GeoTIFF or another GIS-friendly format?

If there are specific steps required before opening the data in QGIS?

If helpful, I can provide the exact dataset name and file structure I downloaded.

Thank you very much for your guidance.

Thank you for your interest in SeaDAS. Here is where you can download the software. https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/tools/seadas

You can visualize, analyze and process NASA Ocean Color data with SeaDAS.

It seems that you could use "export" in SeaDAS to convert your file to GeoTIFF - https://seadas.gsfc.nasa.gov/help-9.2.0/geotiff/ExportGeoTIFF.html

It will be helpful if you could give us the name of a sample file you intend to work with.