SHORTNOTE Photonirvachak Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing, Vol. 30, No. l&2, 2002 Extraction of MSMR Data for Windows and Linux Based Applications RAHUL KANWAR AND UJJWAL NARAYAN Department of Civil Engineering Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur - 208016 INTRODUCTION Low cost personal computers with enough computing power are easily available now a days and they can be used for processing of satellite data. Processing of satellite data with automated analysis and interpretation can be easily carried out using personal computers. Earlier, the processing of remote sensing data was possible only on costly workstations running UNIX or IRIX operating systems. However, with the speed of the personal computers growing with leaps and bounds it is now possible to develop softwares to carry out data processing on low cost personal computers running Windows and LINUX operating systems. Satellite data for various applications is also easily available with a large number of satellites in operation. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has launched numerous remote sensing satellites and many more are under development to be launched in the future. The present paper deals with the processing of Multi-Frequency Scanning Microwave Radiometer (MSMR) data for the Window and LINUX environment. MSMR Data Representation The Multi-Frequency Scanning Microwave Radiometer (MSMR) onboard the IRS-P4 satellite records Brightness Temperature Data (BTD). Each data set corresponds to 48 hours is organized in four segments. All four segments cover the entire globe. Each segment Recd. 25 March, 2002; in final form 2 May, 2002 file corresponds to a data of about 12 hours, given at three different spatial resolutions namely 150, 75, and 50 km. Every file has a header record in ASCII and data records in binary form (Big Endian). A header has general information about the entire data set, time, latitude, longitude, satellite ,parameters, format of records, and information about bad data. The brightness temperature data contains header information of 150 bytes. The data records for each grid contain