Reading software are provided with Aviso data for the various data formats available. Note that since we can't provide those for all existing languages and platforms, those programs may not work for your precise configuration.

The Basic Radar Altimetry Toolbox is a collection of tools and tutorial documents designed to facilitate the use of radar altimetry data. It is able to read most distributed radar altimetry data from all the satellites, to do some processing, data editing and statistic over them, and to visualise the results. The Basic Radar Altimetry Toolbox is able to read ERS-1 and 2, Topex/Poseidon, Geosat Follow-on, Jason-1, Envisat, and the future Jason-2 and Cryosat missions altimetry data from official data centres (Esa, Nasa/JPL, Cnes/Aviso, Noaa), and this for different processing levels, from level 1B (Sensor Geophysical Data Record) to level 3/4 (gridded merged data).

•  Basic Radar Altimetry Toolbox

For Duacs NetCDF data (both gridded and along-track), two different sets of programs are available:

• Sources programs:
  PublicReadDelivery.tar.gz contains read/write libraries plus sample ascii dump programs in C/Fortran.
• Precompiled packages
  PublicReadBinaries.Linux.tar.gz, PublicReadBinaries.MSWindows.zip, PublicReadBinaries.SunOS.tar.gz contain precompiled binary files corresponding to the above mentionned libraries.

Readme explaining the content of each tar files are provided inside.

For Jason-2 NetCDF, reading software are available at ftp://avisoftp.cnes.fr/AVISO/pub/jason-2/documentation/software/.

Note that NetCDF data can be browsed and used through other software, like:

• ncBrowse
• NetCDF Operator (NCO)
• The Live Accesss Server is also a visualization tool that can be used to preview data (Ssalto/Duacs gridded NRT and DT data)
• Through the Opendap

Further information on NetCDF format.

OSTM/Jason-2

For the Jason-2 IGDR and GDR family products, dedicated reading software are available at ftp://avisoftp.cnes.fr/AVISO/pub/jason-2/documentation/software/.They are provided for the NetCDF format. A Readme is available in the sub-directories containing the programs.

For the Jason-2 OGDR family product, two formats are provided:

•  A NetCDF format, see detailed description on ftp://avisoftp.cnes.fr/AVISO/pub/jason-2/documentation/software/,
• an additionnally BUFR-formatted dataset (created only for the OSTSM/Jason-2 mission). A BUFR reading software library can be obtained from http://www.ecmwf.int/products/data/software/bufr.html.

Eumetsat puts to users a set of tools for converting netCDF formatted Jason-2 OGDR files into BUFR. Theses documents contain software used to reformat the Jason-2 OGDR data from netCDF to BUFR, the description to identify how the products have been manufactured and the report of the testing results. See detailed description by downloading FIST_Jason2_BUFR_Conversion.tar

Jason-1

Dedicated reading software for Jason-1 (I)GDR and OSDR are available at ftp://avisoftp.cnes.fr/AVISO/pub/jason-1/documentation/software/
They are provided for the following languages : C, Fortran, IDL, Java, PVWave, VBasic. A Readme is available in the sub-directories containing the programs.

Topex/Poseidon

For Topex/Poseidon MGDR data, reading programs in Fortran (Unix and Vax) are delivered with the CD Roms.

Reading software are available at ftp://ftp.aviso.oceanobs.com/pub/oceano/AVISO/software/

Marine Geospatial Ecology Tools (MGET) is an open source geoprocessing toolbox developed by Duke University Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab designed for coastal and marine researchers and GIS analysts who work with spatially-explicit ecological and oceanographic data. MGET includes over 150 tools (among which the Aviso downloading tool) useful for a variety of tasks, such as converting oceanographic data to ArcGIS formats. Currently under development are tools for identifying rings and eddy cores in sea surface height images, for analyzing connectivity networks, for estimating fishing effort when no effort data are available, for predicting hard bottom habitat from coarse grain bathymetry, and much more.

Marine Geospatial Ecology Tools main page, command line syntax and expressions for downloading Aviso SSH Dataset to ArcGIS Rasters.