SCIA reading tools
SCIA reading tools
For the validation community, reading of SCIAMACHY data is essential. Enviview is usefull for a first look of the content only, but not suitable for scientific work.
Here, a commandline tool for reading SCIAMACHY Level 2 products and a library for reading Level 1C products (including an example implementation) is provided.
Other sources of reading tools are the Basic Envisat Atmospheric Toolbox project (BEAT) (Science and Technology) and the NL-SCIA-DC software to read, select and calibrate GOME/Sciamachy data (Richard van Hees, SRON). Official tool is EnviView, usable for a first look to all EnviSat data.
In July 2006, first products with processor version 3.0 are available. Problems with the new limb profiles (values between species were mixed) made an update necessary. With intermediate versions, basic support for MIPAS products were added.
The tool reads all SCIAMACHY Level 2 Products (NRT, OL, Meteo) and GOME Level 2 products, also part of MIPAS Level 2 products. Please have a look to the README file for usage instructions, installation and limitations.
The previous version 0.94 is still available for reading OL products with version SCIA-OL/2.1.
The previous version 0.92 is still available for reading the first available OL products (before SCIA-OL/2.1).
The previous public version 0.62 is still available, because the interface had to be changed for the new version.
The procedure to extract geolocation information belonging to a certain product from a SCIAMACHY level-2 data file is not trivial. Vincent Soebijanta et al wrote a short manual describing the organisation of the geolocation information in the SCIAMACHY Level 2 products and how to assign them correctly to the science data values. However, the reading routine above deals internal with this issue. Using sciaL2_ascii, you don't have to care about the details of how the geolocation is stored in the SCIAMACHY data files.
Klaus Bramstedt
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