HDF-EOS Tag

MuQun (Kent) Yang, The HDF Group

Many NASA HDF and HDF5 data products can be visualized via the Hyrax OPeNDAP server through Hyrax’s HDF4 and HDF5 handlers.  Now we’ve enhanced the HDF5 OPeNDAP handler so that SMAP level 1, level 3 and level 4 products can be displayed properly using popular visualization tools.

Organizations in both the public and private sectors use HDF to meet long term, mission-critical data management needs. For example, NASA’s Earth Observing System, the primary data repository for understanding global climate change, uses HDF.  Over the lifetime of the project, which began in 1999, NASA has stored 15 petabytes of satellite data in HDF which will be accessible by NASA data centers and NASA HDF end users for many years to come.

In a previous blog, we discussed the concept of using the Hyrax OPeNDAP web server to serve NASA HDF4 and HDF5 products.  Each year, The HDF Group has enhanced the HDF4 and HDF5 handlers that work within the Hyrax OPeNDAP framework to support all sorts of NASA HDF data products, making them interoperable with popular Earth Science tools such as NASA’s Panoply and UCAR’s IDV.  The Hyrax HDF4 and HDF5 handlers make data products display properly using popular visualization tools. 

Lindsay Powers, The HDF Group

The 2015 HDF workshop held during the ESIP Summer Meeting was a great success thanks to more than 40 participants throughout the four sessions.  The workshop was an excellent opportunity for us to interact with HDF community members to better understand their needs and introduce them to new technologies. You can view the slide presentations from the workshop here.

From my perspective, the highlight of the workshop was the Vendors and Tools Session where we heard from Ellen Johnson (Mathworks), Christine White (Esri), Brian Tisdale (NASA), and Gerd Heber (The HDF Group) talk about new, and improved applications of HDF technologies.  For example:  

Lindsay Powers - The HDF Group The HDF Group provides free, open-source software that is widely used in government, academia and industry. The goal of The HDF Group is to ensure the sustainable development of HDF (Hierarchical Data Format) technologies and the ongoing accessibility of HDF-stored data because users and organizations have mission-critical systems and archives relying on these technologies. These users and organizations are a critical element of the HDF community and an important source of new and innovative uses of, and sustainability for, the HDF platforms, libraries and tools. We want to create a sustainability model for the open access platforms and libraries that can serve these diverse communities in the future use and preservation of their data. As a...

...we focus on how far we can push our personal computing devices with Spark. It consists of 7,850 HDF-EOS5 files covering 27 years and totals about 120 GB. We use a driver script, which reads a dataset of interest from each file in the collection, computes per-file quantities of interest, and gathers them in a CSV file for visualization. The processing time on our reference tablet machine for 3.5 years of data using 4 logical processors was about 10 seconds....