How can I view AMSR-E L2A brightness temperature data?
First, you can open the AMSR-E L2A data automatically with ENVI, which handles the HDF-EOS data format by selecting the variable you wish to view, for example, 6.9V_Res.1_TB. (NSIDC performed these steps with ENVI 3.6). Otherwise, we suggest a free utility called hdp created by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) for dumping HDF data to binary format. This utility can also extract the header information to a text file so that you can easily view the variables in the data and their associated attributes. You can then search the header information for the particular variable you are interested in viewing, for example, 6.9V_Res.1_TB, to view attributes associated with that variable. The dimensions of this attribute are listed as Dim0, which is the number of lines (y dimension), and Dim1, which is the number of samples or scans (x dimension). Example values are 2001 and 243 for the 6.9V_Res.1_TB variable. All of the data except for the 89 GHz have 243 scan pixels, bu
