BEAM Help

BEAM Version 4.10

Overview

The BEAM Earth Observation Toolbox and Development Platform, is a collection of executable tools and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) which have been developed to facilitate the utilisation, viewing and processing of a variety of remotely sensed data. The purpose of the BEAM is not to duplicate existing commercial packages, but to complement them with functions dedicated to the handling of data products of earth observing satellites.

The main components of the BEAM are:

VISAT - An intuitive desktop application used for EO data visualisation, analysing and processing.
A set of scientific data processors running either from the command-line or invoked by VISAT.
The command-line tool gpt (graph processing tool) is used to execute processing graphs made up of operators nodes developed using the BEAM GPF (see Java API below).
A data product converter tool pconvert allowing a user to convert raw data products to the BEAM-DIMAP standard format, to GeoTIFF, to HDF-5 or to RGB images.
A Java™ API which provides ready-to-use components for remote sensing related application development and plug-in points for new BEAM extension modules. Besides a number of extension points such as product reader and writers, the BEAM API comprises the Graph Processing Framework (GPF) which is used to rapidly create raster data processors. The VISAT Rich Client Platform is used to develop rich GUI user interface applications based on BEAM VISAT.

Supported Product Formats

This following table lists the data product formats which are supported using the reader modules provided in the BEAM standard installation. Other readers are provided as plug-ins or by dedicated BEAM add-on toolboxes such as the GlobToolbox, and the SMOS-Box. A variety of data products may also be imported by the standard NetCDF and GeoTIFF readers. Information about access to the products supported by the standard installation is given on the Data Sources page.

Instrument	Platform	Format
MERIS	Envisat	Envisat N1
MERIS Binned Level-3	Envisat	netCDF
AATSR	Envisat	Envisat N1
ASAR	Envisat	Envisat N1
ATSR	ERS	ERS
ATSR	ERS	Envisat N1
SAR	ERS	Envisat N1
Chris	Proba	HDF4
AVNIR-2	ALOS	CEOS
PRISM	ALOS	CEOS
MODIS	Aqua, Terra	HDF
AVHRR/3	NOAA-KLM	NOAA METOP
TM Thematic Mapper	Landsat 5	Fast Format GeoTIFF
NASA Ocean Color (OBPG)	MODIS A/T, SeaWiFS, OCTS, CZCS	HDF
GETASSE DEM	N/A
SPOT VEGETATION	SPOT	HDF
Generic NetCDF/CF-products	N/A	NetCDF/CF
HDF-EOS gridded products	N/A	HDF
Generic GeoTIFF-products	N/A	GeoTIFF

Standard Product Format

VISAT and the scientific data processors use a simple data input/output format, which makes it easy to import ENVISAT data in other imaging applications. The format is called DIMAP^® and has been developed by SPOT-Image, France. The BEAM software uses a special DIMAP profile called BEAM-DIMAP, which has the following characteristics:

A single product header (XML) containing the product meta-data
An associated data directory containing ENVI^®-compatible images for each band.
Each image in the directory is composed of a header file (ASCII text) and an image data file (flat binary)

Source Code

The complete BEAM software has been developed under the GNU public license and comes with full source code (Java^TM).

Supported Platforms

BEAM is programmed in pure Java™ to allow a maximum portability. The BEAM software has been successfully tested under MS Windows™ XP^®, Windows™ Vista, Windows™ 7 and also Mac OS X and as well as under Linux and Solaris^® operating systems.