Im concerned about disk space. How big are the uncompressed files?
A minimum bounding rectangle is used as the boundary for masking out each state image file. The uncompressed image files are thus of a greatly varied size. Because each image file must contain data values for every pixel in the minimum bounding rectangle, file sizes are not necessarily directly correlated to the number of square kilometers in a given state. For example, Florida’s odd shape results in a large minimum bounding rectangle and a fairly large image file. As a very rough estimate, count on the uncompressed file to be at a minimum of 5 or 6 times as large as the compressed “.gz” file. If you need an exact value for the file size, check out the “README” file for the state you’re interested in. Because this is 8-bit data (byte data) and is a flat, headerless image file, you can calculate the exact file size in bytes by multiplying the number of lines in the image times the number of samples.
