McIDAS-V—Accessing, visualizing and analyzing multi and hyperspectral environmental satellite data

The University of Wisconsin's Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) has been at the forefront in developing data analysis and visualization tools for environmental satellite and other geophysical data. The fifth generation of the Man-computer Interactive Data Access System (McIDAS-V) is a Java-based, open-source, freely available software system to support researchers and algorithm developers using multispectral and hyperspectral data. A key attribute of analysis and visualization systems is access to and display of a large variety of geophysical data. Providing these capabilities for numerous data types provides research and operational users with powerful tools for merging information, comparison of products and evaluation. McIDAS-V provides powerful data manipulation and visualization tools for working with future GOES-R and NPP/JPSS data, while continuing to support current environmental satellite systems and its broad McIDAS user base. The McIDAS-V software tools provide expanded capability and performance to support innovative techniques for developing and evaluating algorithms, visualizing data and products, and validating results. A review of the current state of McIDAS-V will be presented with a demonstration of the data acquisition, visualization and analysis tools to support the international polar and geostationary environmental satellite programs.