Calvalus - An efficient processing system for cal/val and algorithm development is now available
Brockmann Consult successfully completed the ESA Calvalus project - A system which performs efficient bulk processing of large amounts of satellite data. Calvalus aims at supporting Earth Observation cal/val activities and algorithm development by providing fast access to mission-wide satellite data and a highly configurable processing environment. The Calvalus system utilises Apache Hadoop and the ESA BEAM development platform and achieves its enhanced performance from the massive parallelisation and data-local execution of processing tasks.
14. Nov 2011
BEAM is mentor at ESA SOCIS: Apply now!
ESA Summer of Code in Space (SOCIS) is a pilot programme run by the Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency that offers student developers stipends to write code for various space-related open source software projects.
Through SOCIS, accepted student applicants are paired with mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios. In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers.
BEAM has been accepted as a mentoring organization by ESA. Students can now apply for suggested ideas, through the SOCIS Webpage, until 27th of July. For a list of suggested ideas see the SOCIS Ideas Page.
20. Jul 2011
BEAM 4.9 is now available
The new BEAM 4.9 release comes with a new Envisat MERIS data processor, named 'Radiometry Correction'. It combines a Smile-effect correction, an equalisation, a radiance-to-reflectance conversion and a new radiometric re-calibration. For exporting pixels from a bunch of data products a new tool has been introduced. Another 4.9 feature is that files can now be dragged from the file explorer onto the VISAT products view in order to open them.
For a complete list of changes please see the issue summary.
The installer for BEAM 4.9 can be downloaded from the BEAM download page.
12. May 2011
SMOS-Box 2.1.1 released
SMOS-Box 2.1.1 is now available for download. Version 2.1.1 fixes issues with the export of SMOS grid point data to the Earth Explorer and CSV formats.
03. Dec 2010
SeaDAS 7 frontend will build on BEAM rich client platform
More than a year ago we announced that BEAM has met the NASA Ocean Biology Processing Group (OBPG) in order to dicuss a possible migration of the SeaDAS IDL frontend to the BEAM Java rich client platform. The new SeaDAS 7 source code repository can be found at http://github.com/seadas. For SeaDAS users who want to stay informed or want to give feedback to the SeaDAS team can go to a new board in the SeaDAS 7 development forum.
28. Oct 2010
New MERIS L1 Equalization processor and updates for BEAM 4.8
The MERIS L1 Equalization processor, a new processor for MERIS Level 1 data products, is now available. It performs a radiometric equalization of the MERIS L1b products. It reduces detector-to-detector and camera-to-camera systematic radiometric differences and results into a diminution of the vertical stripping observed on MERIS L1b products.
Additionally, several modules of BEAM have been updated. The changes are listed in the issue summary.
16. Sep 2010
CHRIS-Box 1.5.2 released
CHRIS-Box 1.5.2 is now available for download. It is a mere maintenance update which allows the CHRIS-Box to be run together with BEAM 4.8, the latest release.
02. Aug 2010
EPR C-API 2.2 released
A maintenance release of Envisat Reader API has been released. The API now functions correctly on 64-bit architectures.
The second version of GlobToolbox is now available for download. It extends the first version of the GlobToolbox by a number of tools tackling the time dimension. First of all, a time series manager allows to define and edit time series. A time series player allows vividly visualising a time series by providing the control elements for navigating through a time series, either manually or automatically. And a time series graph has been developed which may be used to compare values of different measures, such as TSM or SST, for a specified time series.
Apart from time series, the GlobToolbox 2.0 additionally allows to export arbitrary global products to the widely used NetCDF/CF-format.
30. Jul 2010
BEAM 4.8 released
In this release we have added a number of new readers to enable BEAM to work with even more remote sensing products. In particular we have added readers for products originating from the SPOT VEGETATION programme, for Landsat TM products in GeoTIFF format, for HDF-EOS gridded products as well as a reader for generic NetCDF/CF-products. BEAM 4.8 also allows to export products to the widely used data format NetCDF/CF.
As another feature it is now possible to apply "auto-grouping" in the product tree; that is, product nodes whose names begin equally are automatically put into a common group.
The installer for BEAM 4.8 can be downloaded from the BEAM download page.
Version 4.7.1 of BEAM is a maintenance update. Multiple issues have been addressed to improve the usability of VISAT with the focus on the management of image masks and regions of interest, and their display. It also fixes a number of minor bugs and additionally improves the BEAM Graph Processing Framework (GPF API) in better supporting the development of "window processing" such as image filters and convolutions.
The BEAM CHRIS-Box project has been brought into life in order to support users of data of the CHRIS sensor onboard of the ESA Proba platform. The CHRIS-Box comprises the following add-on modules for BEAM:
Noise Reduction
Cloud Screeening
Atmospheric Correction
Geometric Correction
For more information, please refer to the CHRIS-Box Wiki.
The first version of the GlobToolbox is now available for download. It contains multiple data product reader in order to read products the various Glob* projects. Because of that we also call this release the 'Reader Pack'. It does not yet contain tools for generation, inspection and analysis of time series. These fuctionality will be provided with the next releases. If you like, have a look into the GlobToolbox Wiki
03. Mar 2010
SMOS-Box 2.0 released
Version 2.0 of the SMOS-Toolbox for BEAM (SMOS-Box) was released last week, a few days after the first calibrated SMOS images had been delivered.
The toolbox has been brought into life in order to support users of data acquired by ESA's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, which was launched into orbit from northern Russia on 2 November. BEAM and the SMOS-Box are user tools, which ESA/ESRIN is providing free of charge to the earth observation community.
Version 2.0 of the SMOS Toolbox comes with support for SMOS L1c & L2 user data, and ECMWF, LAI, VTEC, and LSMASK auxiliary data products and brings improved performance for the display of SMOS image data and the calculation of statistics.
Brockmann Consult is developing the SMOS-Toolbox for BEAM under ESA contract initiated by S. Delwart (ESTEC) and P. Regner (ESRIN).
01. Mar 2010
Now Available: BEAM 4.7
The final version of BEAM 4.7 is out now. We want to thank our users for the valueable feedback we have gotten regarding the RC1 release. Read more about the new release in the change log and the news entry about the Release Candidate. For an overview of the changes made to the API please refer to our Wiki - BEAM 4.7 API Changes.
22. Feb 2010
Now Available: BEAM 4.7 Release Candidate 1
The first release candidate of BEAM version 4.7 has now been made available for public review today. The BEAM development team is keen to obtain your feedback on the following new features and enhancements:
VISAT now provides a Geometry Management allowing users to draw and manipulate geometries (vector data) or import them from ESRI Shapefiles. Geometries are now an integral part of the BEAM data model.
The VISAT Mask and ROI Management has been completely revised. Any number of named raster data masks can be defined by band math expressions, value ranges and from existing geometry. Each mask can serve as 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.
Thanks 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 over 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 batch mode pre- or post-processing. Finally, the runtime performance of this tools could be drastically improved.
The Navigation tool window has been improved. It now offers the possibility to display a synchronized pixel cursor in all image views.
The World Map tool window has been completely revised. It now uses a very high-resolution RGB (NASA Blue Marble) in which you can easily pan and zoom in and out.
11. Jan 2010
SMOS-Box 2.0 scheduled for release
Version 2.0 of the SMOS-Toolbox for BEAM (SMOS-Box) is going to be released by the end of November, a week before the SMOS 'first light', which is expected to occur in the second week of December.
The toolbox has been brought into life in order to support users of data acquired by ESA's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, which was launched into orbit from northern Russia on 2 November. BEAM and the SMOS-Box are user tools, which ESA/ESRIN is providing free of charge to the earth observation community.
Version 2.0 of the SMOS Toolbox comes with support for SMOS L1c & L2 user data, and ECMWF, LAI and VTEC auxiliary data products. It offers the ability to write spatial subsets extracted from SMOS L1c & L2 data in Earth Explorer format, and brings improved performance for the display of SMOS image data and the calculation of statistics.
Brockmann Consult is developing the SMOS-Toolbox for BEAM under ESA contract initiated by S. Delwart (ESTEC) and P. Regner (ESRIN).
06. Nov 2009
BEAM 4.6.1 released
Version 4.6.1 of BEAM is a maintenance update. It fixes a number of minor issues and solves two major problems introduced by Update 4 for Mac OS X 10.5:
Read more about the new release in the change log.
03. Jul 2009
BEAM meets SeaDAS
Recently the BEAM development team of Brockmann Consult visited the NASA Ocean Color Group in order to figure out a possible collaboration between the SeaDAS and the BEAM project. All participants felt that the meeting was very worthwhile and even exceeded the expectations.
Mark Ruebens, who is leading the SeaDAS development, explained that NASA has plans to modernise the SeaDAS user interface. BEAM has been selected as a possible candidate to serve as a platform for a new SeaDAS user interface.
The BEAM development team gave an overview of the BEAM architecture and outlined the possibilities the BEAM development platform and the VISAT user interface offers. Special SeaDAS requirements and their realization using BEAM have been discussed in detail. A number of constraint requirements have been identified and addressed during the discussions:
The SeaDAS software shall retain its identity and development plans, and shall neither evolve into a clone of BEAM nor appear as a plug-in to BEAM.
The new SeaDAS user interface must still be able to call the external Ocean Color / Sea Surface Temperature Level 2 processor and other tools written in C and other programming languages.
SeaDAS users should still be able to use the Interactive Data Language (IDL) which is currently an integral part of SeaDAS for writing scripts, perform band arithmetic and to perform batch mode (bulk file) processing.
Both teams agreed on a collaboration within a new, common open-source project and now looking forward kicking it off. The new project has the aim to develop software components both helping the SeaDAS team to migrate their current user interface to BEAM but also enrich the BEAM development platform by new functionality such as
external software invocation and data exchange API (calling programs written in C or IDL from BEAM/VISAT),
batch mode (bulk) processing and data export and IDL scripting.
30. Jun 2009
SMOS-BOX Version 1.0 is available
Version 1.0 of the SMOS-Box is now available for download.
The project SMOS Toolbox for BEAM (SMOS-Box) has been brought into life in order to support users of data acquired by ESA's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission. SMOS-Box is a user tool which ESA/ESRIN is providing free of charge to the Earth Observation Community.
Information about how to retrieve test data and the source code of the SMOS Toolbox can found at the SMOS Wiki.
