Current Issues

Below is an overview of currently known issues for each of the downloadable packages.

BEAT

Problems with BEAT-II interface in 64-bit mode for MIPAS L2 and GOME L1

If you try to use the BEAT-II ingestions for MIPAS L2 or GOME L1 you may get unexpected errors or invalid data when using BEAT compiled with 64-bit support (note that all binary installers of BEAT and VISAN are currently 32-bit, so these are not affected).

The problems will be fixed in the next release of BEAT.

In the mean time you can perform the following modification to the BEAT sources (then rebuild and reinstall the software) to fix the problem: in the following locations change the occurence of sizeof(int) to sizeof(long):

• libbeatl2/beatl2-mip_nl__2p.c line 235 and 242
• libbeatl2/beatl2-gome_l1.c line 1727
• libbeatl2/beatl2-gome_l1_extracted.c line 1421 and 1435

"cannot open shared object" errors in IDL/MATLAB interface on Linux

If you install BEAT in the default location (/usr/local/) on Linux then on some systems you will first have to run the ldconfig tool, without parameters, as root to update the cache of installed libraries. If you do not do this then the CODA, BEAT-I and BEAT-II libraries that are installed in /usr/local/lib will not be accessible by the IDL and MATLAB interface modules that link to them and you will therefore get an error if you try to run the IDL/MATLAB interfaces.

BEAT-II STL SO2 ingestion for OMI L2 returns wrong data

When trying to ingest SO2 STL data from OMI L2 using BEAT-II, BEAT will currently fail with an internal error.

The problem will be fixed in the next release of BEAT.

If you use the source version of BEAT you can apply the following patch to fix this problem. In the file libbeatl2/beatl2-omi_l2.c on line 877 change:

          else if (info->so2_column_level == 2)

to:

          else if (info->so2_column_level == 3)

BEAT IDL interface on Linux - problems with HDF files containing zipped data

In October 2008 an issue was found with the use of the BEAT IDL interface on Linux. This had been fixed for most cases with the BEAT 6.0.1 release. However, there is still a case where you will encounter problems, which is when you try to use BEAT to read data that is stored in zip compressed form in HDF4 or HDF5 files.

The problem has to do with an incompatibility with the zip library that comes with IDL and the one that is publicly available. We have contacted ITTVIS about this situation and they have confirmed that it is an issue with IDL. The issue is currently tracked under Change Request number CR54835 within ITTVIS. It has yet to be verified whether IDL 7.1 contains a fix for the issue or whether this will arrive in a later release.

If you are using the BEAT-II interface of IDL to read data from an HDF file that contains zipped data then there is a possible workaround: You can use the beatl2dump tool to perform the ingestion and export this to a file:

beatl2dump binary -o data.bl2 product.hdf
(you can use the -f option to provide an ingestion filter)

You can then import the data.bl2 file in IDL using:

>>> beatl2_import('binary', 'data.bl2')

Note that this issue was only seen on Linux. It has been verified that it does not affect the BEAT IDL interfaces for Windows and Mac OS X. Whether other platforms (such as Solaris) are affected is unknown.

VISAN

VISAN won't run on Windows 2000

On Windows 2000 VISAN can terminate with the error 'Interpreter exited due to an exception'.

The problem is most likely due to a missing .dll (gdiplus.dll) on the system.

To install this dll, download the redistributable files for GDI+ from the Microsoft website.

When running the application choose a temporary location where the application can extract its files. Then, from the extracted files, copy the file asm\10\msft\windows\gdiplus\gdiplus.dll to the bin directory of your VISAN installation (e.g. C:\VISAN\bin). You can remove the extracted files afterwards.

VISAN crashes on Linux during startup

On some Linux systems VISAN can crash shortly after showing the startup splash screen.

The issue is most likely due to an issue in wxPython. This issue has already been raised to the wxWidgets team under ticket number #3871.

If you are affected by this issue you can disable showing of the splashscreen as a workaround. To do this, edit the file VisanApp.py that is located in the subdirectory lib/python2.6/site-packages/visan of your VISAN installation and just remove line #155 (containing the text 'self._CreateSplashScreen()').

Scientific Tutorial

There are currently no known issues.

GeoFit

There are currently no known issues.