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.

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]:

ncols 157
 
nrows 171
 
xllcorner -156.08749650000
 
yllcorner 18.870890200000
 
cellsize 0.00833300
 
nodata_value -9999
 
0 0 1 1 1 2 3 3 5 6 8 9 12 14 18 21 25 30 35 41 47 53
 
59 66 73 79 86 92 97 102 106 109 112 113 113 113 111 109 106

All values can be doubles or ints.