As part of the work I'm doing, we wanted to look at how likely certain areas are to be developed. We wanted to separate out areas which would definitely be developed, definitely not be developed and those which were "up for grabs".

There are several different scenarios about future development, which each provide a coherent set of parameters for the model. The model is also stochastic, so there are 30 runs for each scenario to give probabilistic futures. The task is to take the results from many runs under each condition, and produce a map showing probabilities of development.

I've repeatedly come across the need to read or write Raster files in Java. These are data files which represent a rectangular grid of data using ASCII representations of numbers. An example, from [1]: