The ENVISAT data products

The Envisat mission is the largest European remote-sensing mission ever flown. It will deliver a very large number of data products from its 10 instruments. The Envisat products will use a specific data format, where each product is orbit based, binary encoded and contains several geophysical quantities in the same product. With the aim of improving and widening the access to the Envisat products, the European Space Agency is developing a product tool (called EnviView) which is characterised by the following main properties: it is platform independent (developed in Java); it can access any Envisat product; it can display the content of any field in the product (image or graphs); it can be run in manual or batch mode; it can display the value of any field in any product along with its format definition and with its scientific definition; it includes the product handbook of all Envisat products. EnviView will be free to all users of Envisat data. In addition, EnviView can convert part or all of an Envisat product into a number of different formats, including HDF. Users who are already familiar with HDF or that have already developed application software with the NCSA HDF library can use EnviView to bring the Envisat products directly into their working environment. This feature can also be used to allow immediate access to the Envisat products by all those commercial software packages which are able to read and manipulate HDF files