The CoastWatch Data Analysis Tool (CDAT) covered in a different module of this course lets you view data files interactively on the screen. The cwrender tool has many of the same capabilities as CDAT for rendering: coast lines, land mask, grid lines, topography, bathymetry, and ESRI shapefile overlays, custom region enlargement, and units conversion. The output formats supported include PNG, JPEG, GIF, GeoTIFF, and PDF. The cwrender tool can create several types of output as shown in Table 3-1. We will give examples of all these output types in the next sections.

Table 3-1: Types of output created by cwrender
Description	Example image
Color enhanced images from a single data variable, eg: SST, reflectance, chlorophyll, windspeed, etc.
Composite red/green/blue images from three variables, eg: false color, true color
Colored vector images from two component variables, eg: wind direction, ocean currents
Hybrid images combining a composite RGB and color enhanced image (both 1 and 2 above)