[R-sig-Geo] Reading National Snow and Ice Data Center binary files

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 12:14 AM, Michael Sumner <mdsumner at gmail.com> wrote:

> Doing it manually is straightforward but laborious and error-prone,
> another option is to use the GDAL VRT format - where you can formalize
> all of the data type, georeferencing, projection and other metadata
> (scaling and so on if necessary) - the you can more or less automate
> the process by generating a .vrt for any of the files you like (and
> you can include subsetting, combining single to multi-bands, scaling
> etc. in the VRT definition).
>
> http://www.gdal.org/gdal_vrttut.html
>
> VRT is surely almost always available in any rgdal/GDAL build since
> it's so generic.
>
> I don't have time to attempt this now, but I know it can work.

 Annoyingly I don't think gdal's raw data vrt system can find out the
number of pixels across/down the raster - you have to code them into
the .vrt file. I reckon with a bit of unix (or in extremis, C code)
craftiness it would be possible to get the info from the header of the
.bin file and write the relevant .vrt file...

 The great thing about standards is...

Barry