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The National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) Preparatory Project (NPP) provides remotely-sensed land, ocean, atmospheric, ozone, and sounder data that will serve the meteorological and global climate change scientific communities while also providing risk reduction for the NPOESS, the U.S. Government’s future low-Earth orbiting satellite system monitoring global weather and environmental conditions.
NPOESS uses the Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) to manage data. As a satellite orbits, it scans the Earth and the data it gathers during a set period of time is called a swath. Swaths are stored as granules of data within a file; a file may contain multiple granules. Within each file, all data is stored in a giant dataset; each granule’s region of data is specified by a reference that selects a portion of the dataset. Given a multi-granule HDF file, slice de-aggregates these granules into individual HDF files.