Site History
West Coast Regional Node

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2005/01/18:

Dr. R. Michael Laurs has retired from NOAA Fisheries and Dr. Cara Wilson has taken over as West Coast Node Manager.

2003/04/03:

The West Coast Regional Node has moved to its new home at the Pacific Fisheries Environmental Laboratory in Pacific Grove, California. Dr. R. Michael Laurs has returned as the West Coast Node Manager. Dave Foley has taken over as CoastWatch Coordinator.

2001/04/30:

Darrel Lawrence has now taken over as CoastWatch Operations Manager from Ray Slanina.

1998/04/30:

Ray Slanina has now taken over as CoastWatch Operations Manager from Peter Hollemans.

1998/04/27:

Two new high-resolution regions were added for the central and southern Baja Mexico area.

1999/04/18:

The web site is now powered by a new Pentium III 450Mhz PC running RedHat Linux. As a result, most web page operations are significantly faster.

1999/03/23:

The El Niño Watch was updated to allow users to view SST fields in addition to SST anomaly.

1999/02/13:

A Visual Index was added to the Visual Catalog pages for easy web navigation between satellite data passes.

1999/02/05:

A number of major improvements were made:

• the Visual Catalog now allows users to see the full extent of collected data for a given pass, and click on cloud-free areas to view the data
• SST data previews are automatically enhanced using the mean and standard deviation of the data
• data preview customization has been simplified
• the ArcView conversion now creates a binary GRID file rather than ASCII, making files smaller and faster to generate
• the database query function is much faster

1999/01/26:

Version 2.2 of the CoastWatch Format (CWF) Software Library and Utilities package was released, adding the following improvements:

• cwftoarc is now more accurate, includes a new "binary output" option, and handles the Alaska polar stereographic projections
• cwfcomp has been added, a new utility for creating time series data composites
• a new set of executables is available, optimized for the Win95/98/NT platform

1998/11/04:

The El Niño Watch online archives were completely reformatted to provide users with a more browser-friendly version of the advisory. The new charts allow users to:

• choose between Celsius or Fahrenheit scales
• pick color or black & white versions
• download high-quality PostScript copies for printing

1998/09/09:

The CoastWatch Format (CWF) Software Library and Utilities package is now available from the software page!

1998/08/31:

Image previews were improved in two ways:

• graphics plane rendering now uses a dynamic algorithm to improve graphics contrast
• the image time stamp is now imprinted onto the bottom of each image

1998/07/09:

Two region layout maps were added to the Data Regions page to show the updated CoastWatch regions.

1998/07/07:

Two new data conversion options were added: netCDF and HDF. Also, notes were added on all conversion formats. The new netCDF and HDF formats should allow users to import data easily into a great number of packages including IDL, GMT, PV-Wave, MATLAB and Tecplot.

1998/06/25:

The CoastWatch web site was completely rewritten. The new web site allows users to:

• query the online CoastWatch data files for specific regions, channels, and dates using a forms based tool
• preview CoastWatch data with a configurable interface to select color map, scaling factors, and overlays, etc.
• convert and download data in other formats
• and more ...

Also, a number of new product regions were added in response to user requests. The new regions B, V, F, E, and J cover waters off British Columbia and Baja Mexico.

1998/05/21:

The CoastWatch web server computer underwent an operating system upgrade and web software change. The updated system is now running Netscape's Enterprise web server which should improve web performance by a small amount. For security reasons, the FTP method of accessing CoastWatch data was disabled. The only way to access CoastWatch data is from the web page.

1998/02/13:

CoastWatch products have changed starting with pass 980432232 (February 12, 1998, 22:32 GMT). The new products have the following differences:

• Automatic navigation. All steps in the creation of CoastWatch products are now accomplished with the new TeraScan image processing package from the SeaSpace Corporation. One of the improvements is the ability to perform automatic coastline navigation. This allows for more efficient operation and for the unattended creation of products on weekends and holidays.

• New graphics planes. The new products for infrared and SST data no longer have the graphics encoded into the image data. Rather, the graphics planes for all data types (visible, infrared, and SST) are encoded into the file separately as is the norm for files created by the NOAA/NESDIS CEMSCS computer for CoastWatch nodes on the East Coast. The decision to change the graphics plane encoding was made to create better uniformity among CoastWatch products from the two coasts, and also in response to user suggestions.

• Improved cloud mask. The masking of cloudy pixels for day and night time SST calculations is now accomplished with a more sophisticated algorithm. The SST data products still include the cloud mask as part of the data; the pixels judged to be cloud are flagged as "missing" values, similar to data outside the satellite scan path. Future improvements to the processing will create cloud mask files as a separate product from the SST as is done for SST products on the East Coast.

• Better registration. The registration (pixel to lat/lon mapping) performed by the old software was known to have inaccuracies that increased with the longitudinal distance from the coastline (actually, the longitudinal distance from the point of manual navigation which was normally a piece of California coast). As a result, there was always a small error in the lat/lon boundary values encoded into the image header, as well as a small pixel drift in the image products near the east-west edges. This has been corrected.

• New visible products. New visible channel 1 and 2 products have been added for the lower resolution regions (N, S, and Z) for completeness. The remaining high resolution regions (W, O, U, C, and L) remain the same.

1997/04/10:

The job of CoastWatch Operations Manager was taken over from Rich Cosgrove by Peter Hollemans.

1996/06/01:

AVHRR channels 1 and 2 albedo images were added.

1996/05/24:

A temperature color bar was added to the image preview page, and preview GIF images are now 'clickable' for easier downloading.

1996/05/24:

Preview GIF images are now full scale, browse images are now 0.35 scale. An online documentation and download page was added for CoastWatch software, which includes CCoast, DECCON, and CWIPS.

1996/01/19:

The complete West Coast El Niño Watch archive is now online.

1995/12/14:

The web site was moved to http://cwatchwc.ucsd.edu/cwatch.html.

1995/12/05:

The West Coast Regional Node web site was reformatted.

1995/09/29:

The 'select' feature for downloading images was enhanced, and a clickable image map added.

1995/09/18:

The CoastWatch West Coast Regional Node web site debuts! CoastWatch Operations Manager: Rich Cosgrove.

Before 1995/09/18:

Darkness ...

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