Envisat level 2 MERIS Support in 10.2? (*N1 files)

AnthonyNguy-Robertson

To start with I do want to say that I know that 10.2 supports "some Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS)" imagery  (direct quote from the help): http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.2/index.html#/Supported_raster_dataset_file_formats/009t0000000q000000/GUID-B396A1E9-DE64-4B27-8922-4E574ED0EFDC/

What I have found is that my MER_FR__2 imagery will load in Arc 10.2; however, it seems to me that it is not seeing the level 2 processing. For example the layers identifiable are 'Norm. ro_surf - MS(1)' to '(13)' and two additional bands 'YS, SPM, Rect. Rho-MDS(16)', and 'Alpha, OPT - MDS(19)'. For a total of 15 bands

If I am understanding the output correctly, I believe I am seeing the 'solar flux' or radiance from the imagery. What I do not see are the other level 2 products such as the corrected surface reflectance, water_vapour, algal_1, aero_opt_thick_865, etc. Even when extracting my ROI from the imagery the resulting files do not contain the layers I need.

Alternatively I have been successful in using the ENVISAT software Beam to convert the *N1 images to TIF files which nets 48 bands (relating to all the reflectance bands and level 2 products). Of which I can then use my python scripts to process the imagery as needed and get the expected results.

I was hoping to avoid the Beam processing for two reasons 1) It takes additional time for processing the images and 2) these intermediary files are quite large ~1GB/image.

Anyone have any luck with using the level 2 MERIS *N1 files?

FYI if you wan to batch process the *N1 imagery to GeoTiffs you can use the command line in windows (assuming you have Beam installed and make a copy of the 'gpt.bat' or link to the original file in the TargetDirectory). The *N1 files should be in the 'ImageDirectory'. The output GeoTiffs will also be in 'ImageDirectory'

forfiles /P C:\ImageDirectory /M *.N1 /C "cmd /c C:\TargetDirectory\gpt.bat Reproject -f GeoTIFF -t @fname.tif -Pcrs=AUTO:42001 @path"