MSG Toolbox is a free software intended to prepare operational LSA-SAF products for further analysis and use in GIS and Remote Sensing software.
A variety of operational products, derived from MSG, are produced by the LSA-SAF partners and distributed via the web and FTP sites as well as the EUMETCast satellite broadcast. The distributed products are usually in the form of bz2 compressed archives that consist of one or more data files in HDF5 format, covering four regions (NAfr, SAfr, Euro, SAme) and mostly with the geostationary view. The MSG Toolbox tool helps to prepare LSA-SAF products for easier integration in a variety of GIS and Remote Sensing software by temporally compositing (e.g. deriving daily values from 15min/30min/hourly products), spatially remapping to standard geographic lat/lon and combining the regions as needed, or reformatting to more widely used file formats such as IDL-ENVI, GeoTIFF or ILWIS.
The utility is intended for all users of operational LSA-SAF products derived from Meteosat Second Generation (MSG), in particular those facing issues with reading or preparing the products for further processing, analysis or visualization. As it facilitates the integration into other GIS and Remote Sensing (RS) software, it is recommended that users have at least a basic understanding of GIS or Remote Sensing techniques.
| Version | Windows | Documentation | Ancillary |
| 1.0 | MSG Toolbox software Size: 145MB (download), 275MB (decompressed). |
User manual Release notes for v1.0 |
Reference grids and land-sea mask Updated: 2015-06-17 |
MSG Toolbox requires a Java virtual machine (JVM) to run. Please download a copy of Java, for instance Oracle's Java and install that first.
To install the MSG Toolbox, download a copy of the software above. Open the self-extracting archive and unzip it to a folder, e.g. c:\MSGToolbox. Then launch the .jar or .bat file there.
While the ancillary reference grids are included in the software installation, they may be updated separately in future and can thus be downloaded independently.
For more details, please consult the user manual. Section 1.3 provides contact details for further support.