Enhanced HDF4/HDF5 Drivers

[Yunfeng Jiang]

The background of our work is that many NASA Earth Observing System(EOS) data products cannot be correctly opened by using GDAL, therefore, cannot be used for analysis and visualization. The problems are various, such as missing georeference, image rotation, and not being able to access multi-dimensional data. Most of GIS software (both commercial and open source) use GDAL to access these data products.

Although the problem might be caused by the mess in data structure, it will take very long way for NASA data producing team to change their models. Therefore, our project aims to address the variety of problems from GDAL level. We are trying to modify GDAL source code to make GDAL compatible and adaptive with those problems. Since most of EOS data products are stored in the format of HDF4/HDF5, the modification is in HDF4 and HDF5 data drivers.

To avoid affecting non-NASA HDF4/HDF5 products, we use an xml to configure the functions of solving the problems mentioned above. Our development is based on GDAL 2.0.0 and the enhanced version has been tested in main GIS software (ArcGIS and QGIS) and been able to access ASDC products correctly. ASDC co-worker is outreaching the other NASA data center to adopt our method. Esri, the largest GIS software vendor is also planning to take our modified GDAL library. As long as our modification being used by them, our work will benefits thousand of hundreds scientists who would use GDAL to process EOS data in their research. We are about to test more EOS data and enhance the HDF4/HDF5 data drivers.

I'd like to ask if there is an interest in this drivers and if it would be possible to integrate it into the official HDF drivers set.

[Yunfeng Jiang]

please reach me at yjiang7@…, if you have any questions or comments on it.

[Ryan J Ollos]

WrongTrac.