Announcing TerraSTREAM 0.3
We are pleased to announce the immediate release of the second milestone beta release of TerraSTREAM. TerraSTREAM provides a series of components that perform flow modeling and terrain analysis tasks on very large digital elevation models and works equally well on TIN and grid DEMs. The algorithms used in the libraries have provable efficient performance in the worst case, even on very large terrains that do not fit in the main memory of the computer. TerraSTREAM 0.3 comes with direct GRASS and ArcGIS support as well as a simple standalone graphical user interface and powerful command line tools that can be used alone or integrated into most GIS environments by scripting. For more information about this release and for contact information, visit http://madalgo.au.dk/Trac-TerraSTREAM/.
We would like to thank all of our testers, we have received a great amount of valuable feedback. If you are interested in TerraSTREAM development and discussions we encurage you to subscribe to our (low volume) mailing list here: http://mailman.daimi.au.dk/mailman/listinfo/terrastream-devel. Future releases will be announced to that mailing list.
Changes between 0.2 and 0.3
This release contains mostly a number of small bug fixes, most importantly TerraSTREAM should now handle nodata in rasters better. Furthermore the ArcGIS extensions now presents the output from the commands in such a way that the output can be retained in case of a crash. Finally, a --verbose option has been added to all modules which enables some extra debug information in some cases.
Besides small fixes here and there, the full list of fixed bugs is here:
- ticket:10
- Command Line Window in ArcGIS Tool Disappears When TerraSTREAM Crashes
- ticket:11
- ArcGIS Raster Driver Should Compute Max/Min? Grid Statistics
- ticket:12
- Problem importing ESRI grids with "NoData?" values = -3.4028235e+038
- ticket:13
- GDAL driver does not read the nodata value in grids
- ticket:16
- ArcGIS Writer does not work if no directory path is specified
- ticket:17
- Accumulate "Sweeping Down" Progress Bar Does not Always Work
- ticket:18
- Cells incorrectly labelled as nodata in ArcGIS
- ticket:19
- ArcGIS reader interpret information is interpreted incorrectly_ if the nodata value is not explicitly specified with the grid or if it is not expressible using the data type for cell values of the grid.
- ticket:21
- Pfafstetter exception handling
- ticket:26
- Consistent Parameters when flooding
- ticket:27
- Add GUI-support of various persistence types to the conditioning GUI in all front-ends
- ticket:30
- Provide a user option to silence log_debug
Changes between 0.1 and 0.2
Major changes to TerraSTREAM between the 0.1 and 0.2 release include:
- A new native ArcGIS 9.2 raster driver ensures that ArcGIS rasters are imported properly with correct NODATA and cell type interpretations.
- The TerraSTREAM GDAL raster driver now uses GDAL version 1.5 which provide support for a very wide range of raster types.
- The command line tools have been greatly enhanced and now have very flexible input/output options. For instance grids can now be read using the GDAL driver and output using the ArcGIS driver.
- A new separate frontend has been added to compute the LS-factor (the LS factor is an erosion estimation, we refer to external documentation for more information)
- TerraSTREAM now includes a complete set native GRASS modules that work natively with GRASS rasters (using a native GRASS raster driver) and include supports for the GRASS graphical user interface.
- A ArcGIS 9.2 Toolbox has been created with tools for each individual module. Using these tools an ArcGIS user can construct elaborate pipelines using native tools in ArcGIS.
- Communication of bugs and feature requests to the TerraSTREAM developers are now organized and bugs can be easily submitted using the public TRAC system at http://madalgo.au.dk/Trac-TerraSTREAM/ .
Known Bugs and Issues
- The frontends provided for TerraSTREAM 0.3 does not work on TINs. Even though the core components are available for TINs we have not yet developed user-friendly front ends for these since we have not determined what kind of TIN file formats should be supported. If you would like to use TerraSTREAM on your TINs please give use information on the type of file format you use by replying to ticket:8.
Downloading TerraSTREAM
TerraSTREAM 0.3 is available from http://madalgo.au.dk/Trac-TerraSTREAM/.
Note that TerraSTREAM is beta grade software. Bug reports and feature requests are very welcome and will hopefully result in more stable and capable future versions of the software. Please attach the output from the command to the bug report, if possible.
Cheers, The TerraSTREAM Developers - March 27, 2008.