Tools of Atmospheric Processors (ATP) of DLR's Remote Sensing Technology Institute (IMF)


  • scial1c:
  • Extracting and converting SCIA level 1b (uncalibrated plus calibration data) products to level 1c (calibrated spectra). Here is the official download site for this and other tools:

    ESA earth online tools

  • scial2toh5:
  • This tool is only useful for old products (in the proprietary binary format). The new NetCDF products can be read using standard libraries and tools.
    The data sets of the old products included in level 2 files do not contain an own geolocation record. Geolocation information is included in level 2 files as a stand alone (annotation) data set (ADS). This geolocation entry refers to the shortest integration time (IT) of all the measurement data sets (MDS) that are present in the level 2 product. Having only one geolocation data set (actually two, one for nadir and one for limb geometry observations) per level2 file saves a lot of storage space. Since the IT of all MDS's is a multiple of the shortest IT, the geolocation associated to a given MDS can be "straightforwardly" calculated from the geolocation at shortest IT. Unfortunately, there is no official software to do this conversion and new users have to face this problem time after time since the beginning of the mission.

    scial2toh5 has been developed at DLR to facilitate this task. It extracts an arbitrary MDS from a level 2 data set, composes the geolocation for its integration time and saves the data set with the geolocation information into a HDF5 file. It is written in python and uses CODA-BEAT for extracting the information from the level 2 files and PyTables for writing the HDF5 extracts. If you are a python programmer, maybe you are also interested in trying it interactively. It contains some basic functions and methods that could fit your necessities. You can find some brief documentation here about usage, installation and dependencies of the scial2toh5 tool. A tutorial on how to install Python, CODA-BEAT and scial2toh5 on a Windows computer can be found here: scial2toh5 installation tutorial

    Download scial2toh5