I created a Blue Marble image using JPEG compression to obtain a relatively small image that can be used as a background layer for the Area Of Interest map and the base layer for the InterMap map viewer. I used NASA's Blue Marble Next Generation as input and processed it using GDAL.

The following processing was done:

• gdal_translate -of GTiff -co "TILED=YES" -co "BLOCKYSIZE=32" -co COMPRESS=JPEG -co JPEG_QUALITY=80 world-topo-bathy-200407-3x86400x43200.ecw bluemarble_jpeg.tiff