[R-sig-Geo] What is the latest re: reading HDF files with R?

[Rick Reeves]

Greetings:

This week I am working with HDF format files containing ocean color 
imagery (CZCS, SeaWIFS) secured from NASA GSFC,
and would like to bring the image maps into the R environment.

One way I have done this is to use the SeaDAS software to extract a 
2-dim binary floating point matrix (from the HDF file)
and write it to disk, then use R pixmap() to read it in to a vector. 
This works, but one loses all of the image attributes
contained in the HDF header. Now, it would be good to read the HDF file 
directly into R, capturing the header attributes.

I have tried the R HDF5 library routine hdf5load(), which seems to read 
the new .hdf5 format
but NOT the older .hdf format (I tried, unsuccessfully)

Question is: Has anyone developed a technique to read HDF files with R?

Thanks in advance, Rick R

-- 
Rick Reeves	
Scientific Programmer / Analyst	
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
UC Santa Barbara
reeves at nceas.ucsb.edu
www.nceas.ucsb.edu
805 892 2533

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