Download McIDAS-X v. 2019.1

McIDAS software releases are distributed as a total replacement of the core system.  Since May 2009 SSEC has been distributing McIDAS-X updates as fully supported Fastrack releases. This means that the software is fully supported by SSEC, and that each change to the software has been tested on all of the supported system configurations. Full system testing occurs at least once on each platform during each calendar year. Prior upgrade versions were distributed once a year, normally in late-May.

The SSEC McIDAS Help Desk provides full assistance for McIDAS software questions pertaining to the current or previous version. The Help Desk will still assist those sites that are two issues behind the current version at a reduced capability. A complete description of your MUG support is detailed in the SSEC McIDAS Users’ Group Policy Document.  If you are upgrading from an older version, please see the past versions page for links to download files and other materials from past versions.

A login name and password is required to download any software. Once you’ve entered your valid login name and password, you can obtain any other McIDAS software your site is licensed to receive (e.g., McIDAS-X and McIDAS-XCD).

McIDAS-X 2019.1 – released 10 Sep 2019

McIDAS-X Software & Installation for Unix or macOS

2019.1 Installation Instructions for Unix or macOS

Download (e.g., right-click and select Save) the following files to the ~mcidas directory on your McIDAS-X workstation.

See -XRD Information for more information on McIDAS-XRD.

(the compiled version of -X & -XRD is about 1.3 GB)

McIDAS-X Software & Installation for Windows

2019.1 Installation Instructions for Windows

Download (e.g., right-click and select Save) the following files to the ~mcidas directory on your Windows7 workstation.

See -XRD Information for more information on McIDAS-XRD.

(the compiled version of -X & -XRD is about 745 MB)

Note: The installation will fail if the names of the downloaded files do not exactly match those listed. If your web browser changes the names of the files during download (e.g., mcidas2019.1_win7.tar.gz becomes mcidas2019.1_win7_tar.gz), you must rename the files before installing.

What's New in McIDAS-X 2019.1

  • Updated GOES-R Series ABI servers to store GOES-16 and -17 Temperature Data Quality Flag (TDQF) information and report the values in IMGLIST command’s FORM=AUX output, support ABI L2 image products that derive from NOAAPORT distributed image tiles, remove restrictions on names of directories containing the ABI files, and to skip past corrupted files so that IMGLIST and other commands will proceed to subsequent “good” files.
  • Updated VIIR servers with improvements and enhancements. The changes include increasing the number of files allowed in a dataset from 5,000 to 20,000 and removing the previous dataset descriptor naming requirements. The servers were also updated to use the SATANNOT file’s new sensor source numbers 320 (SNPP-SDR) and 321 (NOAA20-SDR).
  • Added DAY= and TIME= keywords to IMGPROBE command to allow use with archive or other servers that require the DAY= keyword to be specified.  The D command (Alt-D) was also updated to include the day value from the frame directory in its request so that it also works with those servers.
  • Updated FRMLABEL and ZA commands to include new (DAYJ) placeholder that plots the date in format dd mon ccyyddd, e.g., 12 OCT 2019285. Also updated FRMLABEL to identify RGB frames (displayed using the RGBDISP command) and thus apply an appropriate image label with no overlapping characters.

See 2019.1 Significant Changes to see a more complete listing of the significant changes, or see 2019.1 – All Software Changes to see a list of all of the code changes included in the release.

If upgrading from an older version, see the past versions page for links to download files and documentation from past versions.

System Requirements

Tested & Supported OS Versions

Apple –

macOS 10.14.6 Intel w/ gcc & gfortran 8.3
macOS 10.13.6 Intel w/ gcc & gfortran 7.3
XQuartz X server

Microsoft –

Windows 7 Enterprise
with Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) and SUA Community Complete Toolset

Red Hat –

Enterprise Linux 7.7 Intel w/ gcc & gfortran 4.8.5
Enterprise Linux 6.10 Intel w/ gcc & gfortran 4.4.7

Complete System Requirements
[macOS & Linux] [Windows]

Future OS Support Plans

OS User Survey Results