A Community-Contributed InSAR Product Archive at UNAVCO

The NASA-supported seamless synthetic aperture radar archive (SSARA) project at UNAVCO has implemented a distributed access system for SAR data and derived data products (i.e. interferograms) through the use of simple web services. Under the SSARA project, a user-contributed InSAR archive for interferograms, time series, and other derived data products was developed at UNAVCO. The InSAR archive is based on the hierarchical data format release 5 (HDF5) data format and provides storage, distribution, and sharing of research results within the geodesy community. HDF5 is the preferred format for InSAR data products because it provides a more robust set of features for storing InSAR data. HDF5 has been adopted by the Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF) and is also used in InSAR time series analysis software packages such as GIAnT from Caltech. Digital object identifiers (DOI) have been incorporated into the archive allowing users to assign a permanent location for their processed result and easily references the final data products. Further development has led to the adoption of the HDF-EOS5 specification that provides standards for data and metadata storage within HDF5. This provides easier integration with GIS software packages such as ArcGIS and GDAL and conversion to other data formats like NetCDF and GeoTIFF.