Seamless Synthetic Aperture Radar Archive for Interferometry Analysis

The NASA Advancing Collaborative Connections for Earth System Science (ACCESS) Seamless Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Archive (SSARA) project is a 2-year collaboration between UNAVCO/WInSAR, the Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF), the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) to design and implement a seamless distributed access system for SAR data and derived data products (i.e. terrain corrected interferograms). A seamless SAR archive increases the accessibility and the utility of SAR science data to solid Earth and cryospheric science researchers. Building on the established webs services and APIs at UNAVCO and ASF, the SSARA project will provide simple web services tools to seamlessly and effectively exchange and share space- and airborne SAR metadata, archived SAR data, and on-demand derived products between the distributed archives and individual users. Development of standard formats for data products and new QC/QA definitions will be implemented to streamline data usage and enable advanced query capabilities. The new ACCESS-developed tools will help overcome the obstacles of heterogeneous archive access protocols and data formats, data provider access policy constraints, and will also enable interoperability with key information technology development systems such as the NASA/JPL QuakeSim and ARIA projects, which provide higher level resources for geodetic data processing, data assimilation and modeling, and integrative analysis for scientific research and hazards applications. The SSARA project will significantly enhance mature IT capabilities at ASF's NASA-supported DAAC, the GEO Supersites archive, supported operationally by UNAVCO, and UNAVCO's WInSAR and EarthScope SAR archives that are supported by NASA, NSF, and the USGS in close collaboration with ESA/ESRIN.