Toward an Unclouded Day in Cloud Computing: Opportunities and Challenges with NISAR Science Data Products, Processing, and Distribution

The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) Mission, planned for launch in January 2022, will acquire over 1 Petabyte of scientific data each year, strobing all land and ice covered surfaces twice every 12 days to measure surface deformation and land cover changes. NISAR will be the first SAR mission to produce a global data set of products beyond the basic imagery: complex imagery, nearest-in-time interferograms and polarimetric covariance products will be produced globally, orthorectified and radiometrically terrain-corrected. These products be hundreds of Petabytes over the life of the mission, presenting enormous opportunities to scientists for exploration of a rich and temporally consistent time series. Due to the myriad of possible applications, products and scientific algorithms that are possible, the Mission will not operationally generate higher level science or applications products, leaving that to the end user or other valued-added organizations. The NISAR data will be processed by the mission team in the cloud and will be archived and distributed by the Alaska Satellite Facility Distributed Active Archive Center, which will also be cloud based. While the archived lower-volume data sets will be useful for many kinds of analysis and could be downloaded and processed in the traditional way, it is clear that there will be a class of problems that will need to use the original high-volume data sets in massive quantities, mostly those involving interferometric time-series analysis. The cloud environment can be a challenge for scientists, who are often not accustomed to processing data there, but downloading these massive data sets can be costly - scientists interested in looking broadly at these data will best do so working on the cloud. NASA and other organizations are recognizing these challenges and are investing in the tools, training, and technology needed to bring them along. This talk will survey the current landscape in opportunities and challenges, and describe trends and initiatives that are developing solutions. These include the "Get Ready for NISAR" project, the Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis project, OpenSARLab, UNAVCO SAR/InSAR training, the Multi-mission Algorithm Development and Analysis Platform to name a few.