Digital Earth Watch (DEW) Software Overview:

Digital Earth Watch consists of ABC's of Digital Earth Watch Software (student book), a Teacher Guide, and five software programs. DEW software includes:

Analyzing Digital Images -- includes LandSat Analysis, MVHimage
Color Basics -- includes MixingColor, TriColor, Game_TriColor, Report_TriColor
Digital Image Basics -- includes Pixelview, ColorPicture, SplitColors, FalseColor, SurfaceType
Forest Analysis
Vegetation Analysis

Digital Earth Watch (DEW) software is part of the Global Systems Science curriculum. It is included with the hard cover Global Systems textbook by John Christensen, which may be purchased from Kendall/Hunt Publisher. It is also included in the 2009 GSS E-book set download which can be ordered online from Lawrence Hall of Science.

Download the DEW software bundle in the download software page.

Software Requirements:

• Programs that manipulate images require Quicktime 5 or later to be installed.
  If not installed, download for free: Mac or PC.


• All software programs are "zipped". You will need the proper freeware utilities installed on your computer.


• Many programs, except the color programs, require a screen resolution of at least 1024 x 768.


• Download the proper software version for your computer: OSX (Mac) or Windows (PC).

Links to More Advanced Image Analysis Software:

• Multispec is a powerful, research level set of remote sensing visualization and analysis tools. Developed and supported by Purdue University. Separate programs for Macs and PCs.
  The MVH team at Indiana State University have created a series of interactive, guided activities that use Multispec.


• ImageJ was developed by the National Institute of Health to meet the medical field's visualization and analysis needs. Software is written in Java, which run on both Macs and PCs.
  Studying change over time with satellite images: Earth Exploration Toolbook chapter, while another Earth Exploration Toolbook chapter gives an example of computing area from satellite images.


• ICE: The Image Composite Editor is designed to be an easy first step into the realm of Earth system science, image processing, data analysis, and satellite remote sensing via your Web browser. This link takes you to guided activities as well as software downloading.