New in BEAM

BEAM Version 4.8

The most important features and enhancements introduced in BEAM 4.8 are summarized here:

• Readers for SPOT VEGETATION products, Landsat TM products in GeoTIFF format, gridded HDF-EOS products, and generic NetCDF/CF-products have been added..
• A writer for generic NetCDF/CF-products has been added.
• The possibility to apply auto-grouping in the product tree has benn added; that is, product nodes whose names begin equally are automatically put into a common group.
• A toolbar button has been added to show a world map overlay on geographic lat/lon projected products.
• The ESA GlobCover Land Cover Map is used as default world map layer now; however, it is still possible to choose the NASA Blue Marble as world map layer instead.

BEAM 4.7

• VISAT now provides a Geometry Management allowing users to draw and manipulate geometries (vector data) or to import them from ESRI Shapefiles. Geometries are now an integral part of the BEAM data model.
• The VISAT Mask and ROI Management has been revised completely. Any number of raster data masks can be defined by band maths expressions, value ranges and existing geometries. Each mask can serve as a region of interest (ROI) for raster data analysis.
• The Statistics, Histogram, and Scatter Plot tool windows have been enhanced in order to support the new, named ROIs. The Statistics tool window can now operate on multiple ROIs.
• The Reprojection (formerly 'Map Projection'), Mosaicing and Orthorectification processors have been redesigned from scratch. Due to the great GeoTools library, BEAM now offers more than 100 predefined, map projections based on their EPSG codes. For user-defined map projections you can now select from 25 map projection transformations and more than 100 geodetic datums. Since the new Reprojection, Mosaicing and Orthorectification processors are developed using the BEAM Graph Processing Framework (GPF), they now offer a powerful command-line and can be used in any GPF XML processing graph for, e.g., pre- and post-processing. Finally, the runtime performance of this tools has been drastically improved.
• The Navigation tool window has been improved. It is now feasible to display a synchronized pixel cursor in all image views.
• The World Map tool window has been completely revised. It now uses a higher-resolution RGB (NASA Blue Marble) in which you can easily pan and zoom in and out.