Readme for GLCF Landsat Wizards for ER Mapper 6 (PC version)

These wizards are designed to help you process Landsat imagery
downloaded from the Global Land Cover Facility (GLCF) website at
the University of Maryland (web address: glcf.umiacs.umd.edu).
The GLCF offers NASA's orthorectified Landsat 5 imagery (circa 1990) 
and Landsat 7 imagery (circa 2000) free of charge for downloading.

The images are provided as g-zipped (.gz) GeoTIFF files, one GeoTIFF
for each Landsat band. There are three wizards here to help speed use
of these images in ER Mapper. You should typically run these in the
order below (the first two for data preparation, the 3rd to view the images.)

- Decompress GZ Files in Batch Wizard
  This wizard decompresses the .gz files to .tif files as a batch
  process. You can decompress all .gz files in a directory, and
  in all directories at the same level. After decompression, the
  original .gz files are deleted. This wizard uses the public domain
  "gzip.exe" program for Windows to do the decompression. Gzip.exe
  is installed automatically with the wizards.

- Set GeoTIFF Null Values to Zero Wizard
  This wizard generates ERS header files for each GeoTIFF and sets the
  "null cell value" to zero (0) in the headers. This automatically masks the
  black edge areas when combining several images into a mosaic. GeoTIFFs
  in a single directory or multiple directories can be processed in batch.

- GLCF Landsat Virtual Dataset Display Wizard
  This wizard lets you combine all the single-band GeoTIFF files for
  each Landsat image into an ER Mapper Virtual Dataset (VD), and lets 
  you display any band combination as an RGB image. The wizard is only
  designed to handle files with the GLCF naming convention, so will not
  work for Landsat GeoTIFFs from other sources. (This is because of the
  strict naming convention that lets the wizard map the GeoTIFF filenames
  to Landsat band IDs.) After a VD is created, it can be used to display the
  Landsat image using File->Open or other methods, or can be opened
  (using File->Open from Virtual Dataset) and saved to an ER Mapper
  Raster Dataset file on disk if desired. (If a Pan band is included in the VD,
  it should be deleted before saving to an ER Mapper Raster file to avoid
  resampling the 30-meter bands bands to 15-meter resolution.)

To install the wizards, first close ER Mapper. Then unzip the
"glcf_landsat_wizards.zip" file into your ER Mapper main install
directory (e.g., ERMAPPER63, etc.). After install, start ER Mapper
and select "GLCF Landsat Wizards" from the Toolbars menu. (If you do
not see the "GLCF Landsat Wizards" toolbar listed, you installed the
wizards into the wrong area.)

Please report any problems or bugs to Eric Augenstein at eric@es-geo.com.
These wizards are provided free of charge "as is" and no warranty for a particular
purpose is offered.

Eric Augenstein
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Earthstar Geographics
5330 Carroll Canyon Road
Suite 206
San Diego, CA 92121 USA

Email eric@es-geo.com
Web www.es-geo.com
Tel +1 858-455-9970
Fax +1 858-455-9971
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