The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences. Vol. XXXVII. Part B7. Beijing 2008 
1302 
Next to ongoing and continued provision of environmental 
products like those from Vegetation for Africa initiative 
(http://www.vgt4africa.org) it is also expected that more data 
and product providers will join in the near future, e.g. the 
CBERS initiative (http://www.cbers.inpe.br) to provide medium 
resolution satellite data for Africa as announced at the GEO-IV 
and Ministerial Summit in Cape Town (November 2007) and 
data processed by SERVIR (http://www.servir.net) for Central 
America. Technically the data dissemination services have 
obtained (near) global coverage making data available for all 
societal benefit areas defined under GEO. However 
GEONETCast is not a data processing system and therefore a 
gap exists between the data access through local ground 
receiving stations and making use of the data-processed 
information. For the societal benefit areas more organizations 
come into play than only the traditional meteorological offices 
who have a national mandate to process this huge stream of 
(near real-time) data and in general have the capability to do so 
(e.g. for Africa through provision of the necessary infrastructure 
by the PUMA-AMESD programme). This is different for the 
other organizations addressing the challenges covering the full 
range of societal benefit areas. Currently it is already difficult to 
cope with the data stream from e.g. the several instruments 
onboard of METOP and therefore the African service is not 
broadcasting this data at this moment. At present this data 
stream is only available via Hotbird, using Ku reception. This 
shows that a continuous data (pre) processing capability 
development effort is required to cope with the increasing range 
of environmental information disseminated by the system. 
The data provided are not in a format which is commonly used 
by the Earth Resources Remote Sensing community (an image 
or product is often split into several data packages - segments, 
eventually compressed, etc). Therefore only a few Windows 
Operating System based freeware tools are currently available 
that provide limited or dedicated capability to incorporate data 
from GEONETCast, like XRIT2PIC (http://www.alblas. 
demon.nl) and SUMO, developed by the South African 
Weather Service (http://www.weathersa.co.za/SUMO). The 
first is capable of handling data from MSG, so called foreign 
satellites (GOES East and West, MTSAT1R and Meteosat-7) 
and METOP-AVHRR/3 and is transforming the data to pictures; 
the second package mainly uses MSG HRIT data for near real 
time visualization, nowcasting and short range forecasting and 
furthermore has the option to display other ancillary 
information like an Instability Index and the Fire product. Both 
are using a data or file manager to cope with the incoming data 
stream. To handle data from METOP, a package called 
EPSView (http://www.eumetsat.int) is available, providing a 
quick and easy look at earth observation products from several 
instruments onboard of METOP and NOAA. Another freeware 
tools is BEAM (http://brockmann-consult.de/beam) and a plug 
in exists for EPS formatted METOP-AVHRR/3 level-IB. From 
EPSView the data can be exported to IDL for more complex 
analysis. The BEAM METOP-AVHRR plug-in is offering a 
radiometric calibrated import capability of the AVHRR data but 
the geometry is currently not handled correctly. Satsignal’s 
suite of Weather Satellite Tools (e.g. Satellite Tracking, HDF 
and Grib Viewer, MSG, AVHRR, Metop Manager and 
GeoSatSignal software tools) (http://www.david-taylor.myby. 
co.uk/software/wxsat.htm) is another alternative, but after a 
short trial period the software has to be registered and one has 
to pay the registration fee upon providing a hardware 
fingerprint for the PC where the software is to run. These 
routines, very comprehensive though, in general lack the export 
capability (apart from pictures) into common used RS-GIS 
formats and the calibrated data is often only available by direct 
readout on the screen. 
3. THE ITC GEONETCAST TOOLBOX APPROACH 
In order to effectively address the challenges posed by several 
of the societal benefit areas not only data is required but also a 
set of tools which transform this data stream into information 
which in turn can support the decision making process. The 
toolbox developed and described into more detail below has to 
be seen as a contribution towards meeting that need. In 
Maathuis et al (2006) a description is provided to setup and 
operate a low-cost GEONETCast ground receiving station. 
Here a C-band receiving configuration, relevant for Africa, is 
described as well as initial software tools developed mainly 
focusing on Meteosat Second Generation HRIT data. Firstly a 
software tool called the MSG File Manager was developed, 
which moves the (selected) newly received data packages onto 
a storage device in a structured manner. Secondly, with the help 
of the MSG Data Retriever the Meteosat-8 and 9 files can be 
imported and used in common available remote sensing 
software packages. The Data Retriever uses the MSG Level 1.5 
data product format and can therefore also be used in 
conjunction with data obtained from the EUMETSAT Archive. 
In the menu of the Data Retriever different options can be 
selected to handle the pre-processing and radiometric - 
geometric conversions. In this way time series of images can be 
easily created and for further analysis of the data, use can be 
made of ILWIS 3.31 and 3.4, a keyless and open source version 
respectively, that have recently become freely available 
(http://www.itc.nl/ilwis and http://52north.org). Additional tools 
to assist in multi temporal data analysis have been improved 
and integrated. Other capabilities incorporated are e.g. 
computation of solar and MSG satellite azimuth / zenith angles. 
Recently, for import and processing of other data sources and 
products in the GEONETCast data stream (e.g. from the 
Meteorological Product Extraction Facility, the Satellite 
Application Facilities and 10 day VGT4Africa products) new 
routines have been developed. A GRIB/GRIB2 decoder was 
added to the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) 
(http://www.gdal.org), a translation library for raster geospatial 
data formats also used for HRIT data format exchange - import 
routines described above. Simple batch routines have been 
developed to import common products such as the Cloud Mask, 
Cloud Top Height, all imported from their original GRIB 
format. The individual data segments of these products received 
via GEONETCast are first merged together to obtain a single 
file (using a tool developed called joinMSG) and are 
subsequently imported. Cipher BUFR decoding 
(http://www.northem-lighthouse.com) is used to handle the 
BUFR encoded products from GEONETCast and the 
EUMETSAT archive. Products successfully imported from 
BUFR format are e.g. various Global Instability Indices (K- 
index, KO-index, Lifted index and amount of Precipitable 
Water) and Atmospheric Motion Vectors. A tool to delete the 
header lines was developed and therefore the intermediate ascii 
table generated, only consisting of space delimited columns, 
can be automatically imported into ILWIS. Using this method 
the header lines are removed from the 15 minutes Fire Product 
(FIR-A, available as an ascii table) and this product can 
therefore also be imported using simple batch routines. 
Using a batch loop sequence the import routines can handle the 
import of multiple images in an automated manner (also dealing