French Space Agency Uses ENVI to Study Ecosystem Evolution
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Customer Challenge
The French Space Agency, CNES (Centre National des Études Spatiales), launched their VEGETATION project ten years ago. They needed a way to process and analyze data on a daily basis to represent the time-sequenced evolution of ecosystems, natural and cultivated vegetation, and even water and icebergs on earth.
Solution Achieved
The answer to that need was CNES' VEGETATION project, which succeeded in implementing a system of data acquisition from satellites for the entire globe. The daily work of the international teams on the VEGETATION project is to register images at regular intervals in order to transmit them as quickly as possible to the end users. The data images are saved and transmitted in raw form to their clients. Most of these clients also use ENVI® to analyze remote sensing images.
Many users of the VEGETATION project data using ENVI enjoy the software's capability to manipulate large amounts of data. This is important because a simple set of data from the entire globe represents about two GB and users are working with several sets of data simultaneously, up to 36 in a single year.
"The entire VEGETATION project team appreciates the proactive nature of ITT's (now NV5) technical support department," said a CNES spokesperson, "The only difficulties encountered were small technical problems due to our poor understanding of the software at the beginning, and the uniqueness of our requirements. In the former case, we immediately received the appropriate assistance, and in the latter case, ENVI developers integrated our requests in the next version release of the software. This allowed us to really automate our data processing. I can honestly say that the entire technical support team has always been very responsive to our needs!"
Benefits
With satellite data and ENVI, they can now process and analyze daily data to represent time-sequenced evolutions of ecosystems, vegetation and water and icebergs on Earth CNES chose ENVI as their image processing software because it is the only commercial software that allows them to read HDF data, and ENVI allows them to manipulate large amounts of data, since they are working with massive datasets from the entire globe ENVI's functionality and extensibility using IDL® allows for complex iterative analysis, in particular time sequenced data analysis. IDL is a powerful application development environment that allows detailed data analysis with high-end visualization and analysis functionality