This blog is mostly about informatics for processing Earth-Observation data.

After more than 13 years in various fields of applications of remote sensing, from research on radiative transfer modelling and inverse problem theory to applications like precision farming or environmental assessment, I came to the conclusion that the lack of skill in informatics can be a serious bottleneck.

Anywhere I’ve been working, I’ve seen brilliant colleagues struggling for days against processings that can be done in some minutes, if they would have known some command lines. The fact is that desktop applications propose predefined functions, but when comes time to do something slightly different, the basic user has to go through many manipulations before getting the expected result. The most frequent manipulations include importing/exporting processing through several file formats to satisfy each software, applying masks to limit the range of application of each function, explode the steps of an algorithm in many intermediate files, to name a few.

In this blog, I’ll drop tips and scripts about some scripting languages. I’ll mostly focus on python/gdal, although I plane to give tips and scripts on windisp (well known in developping countries) and IDL/Envi (which I found to be very convenient, as long as you can afford to pay a licence). A good deal of the posts will also give tips on the good usage of linux and ms-dos for handling files without pain.