The variety of sensors whose data is used in our lab comes with a price: the need to supporta different data format for each sensor, and often several different formats for a sensor depending on the form of the data and what country produced it. While most of the formats are some variation on the CEOS standard format, nonw follows the standard meticulously and so a different program must be written for each format. This is a waste of time.

Consequently, over the last several years, a format converter has been under development by Leland Pierce, mostly in his spare time. This converter allows a programmer or user to specify the format for each data source theyt use. The program then reads in this data and converts it to a new standard format. This new format is self-describing and part of the tools is a program that can read in any data with this format. This software and related documentation is available for free download as sareader.tar.gz [350KB] or sareader.zip[380KB], and the documentation may also be viewed on-line: sareader_userman.ps, [92KB] sareader_refman.ps. [135KB]. The viewgraphs from a recent presentation are also available. Shown below is the GUI that allows a user to run the format converter: