GlobToolbox (Reader Pack) version 1.0 released

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

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).

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.

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.
• The Reprojection tool (formerly 'Map Projection'), the Mosaicing and Orthorectification processors have been redesigned from scratch.
• 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.

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).

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:

[BEAM-1024] VISAT does not launch after Java update on Mac OS X
[BEAM-1025] Installer does not run after Java update on Mac OS X

Read more about the new release in the change log.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

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.

New BEAM VISAT Tutorial

This video tutorial shows the creation of a customised MERIS cloud mask using VISAT. The tutorial demonstrates several features of VISAT and is available on our tutorial page.

NEST 2C now available

The latest release of NEST (Next ESA SAR Toolbox) 2C is now available for free at http://earth.esa.int/nest.

NEST is an ESA toolbox with an integrated viewer for reading, post-processing and analysing ESA and 3rd party SAR data starting from Level 1. Distributed as fully open source, NEST allows users to easily develop new readers and post-processors for SAR data by means of a Java Application Programming Interface (API). NEST is build using the BEAM Development Platform and is developed by Array Systems Computing Inc. under contract to ESA.

BEAM on IGARSS 09

The annually held International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) is one of the premier world conferences in geoscience and remote sensing. IGARSS 09 will be held in Cape Town, South Africa, 12.-17. July. A dedicated presentation with the title Multi-Sensor Image Analysis of African Land and Water Surfaces using the BEAM Toolbox will demonstrate how BEAM can efficiently be used for the remote sensing of African environments. Please visit us in Session 1592 on Friday, 17. July, 14:20-16:00!

BEAM 4.6 released

The new release of BEAM comes with two brand new features:

1. Layer Management: VISAT now allows you to add, remove, change, select and organise the visual layers displayed in a view. Also a couple of new visual layer types have been added to VISAT. Thanks to GeoTools, VISAT can now also display ESRI shapefile overlays and images downloaded from OGC conformant Web Map Services (WMS).
2. Session Management: You can now store and restore your current VISAT session. When a session is restored, all data products are reopened and all views are reconstructed including their layer settings and former positions.

Read more about the new release in the change log. Co-released with BEAM 4.6 is the CHRIS-Box 1.0.2, which is a maintenance update providing compatibility with BEAM 4.6.

EPR C-API 2.1 released

A maintenance release of Envisat Reader API has been released. The API is now compatible with IODD7 and supports MERIS FRS products.

BEAM 4.5.2 released

A maintenance release of BEAM has been published. Check the changes in BEAM 4.5.2 in the changelog.

BEAM 4.5.1 released

BEAM version 4.5.1 is a maintenance release which fixes many problems users reported for version 4.5. Additionally, some important improvements regarding band arithmetic and colour palette handling have been introduced.
For the complete list of changes check the changelog file.

CHRIS-Box 1.0 Add on for BEAM released

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:

1. Noise Reduction
2. Cloud Screeening
3. Atmospheric Correction
4. Geometric Correction (not included yet, will be released December 2008)

For more information, please refer to the

CHRIS-Box Wiki

. The add-on installer can be downloaded from the BEAM download page or from the CHRIS-Box Wiki.

BEAM 4.5 released

The aim of BEAM version 4.5 is to efficiently handle high resolution data products in terms of number of pixels per image. This has been achieved by totally rewriting the imaging code used of BEAM. BEAM now uses tiled images and image pyramids for a number of imaging operations. The result is a greatly improved image display performance and memory usage. BEAM 4.5 also can read and write GeoTIFF.
For the complete list of changes check the changelog file.