Web-based and Cloud-based RTC and InSAR Time Series Stacking of Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery with the Hybrid Pluggable Processing Pipeline (HyP3)

In order to maximize the accessibility of higher level remote sensing imagery, the Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF) has developed a cloud based processing system for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data which provides on-demand processing to produce derived products such as radiometrically terrain corrected (RTC) and Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) products, starting from Level 1 SAR products archived at ASF. This system is known as the Hybrid Pluggable Processing Pipeline (HyP3).

Researchers at ASF have recently enhanced the HyP3 system by adding RTC and InSAR stacking tools. These tools, previously developed at ASF as standalone tools, generate time series products from stacks of RTC and InSAR products provided by the user. However, the tools require complicated installations of software dependencies, such as the Generic InSAR Analysis Toolbox (GIAnT), which diminishes the accessibility of these tools. In addition, these packages often are supported only on Linux systems, and the tools require download of many gigabytes of RTC and InSAR products. HyP3 provides a solution to these complicated installations and resource intensive processing scripts by providing powerful cloud instances with all the necessary software pre-installed, encapsulated behind an intuitive user web interface. HyP3 can be accessed from any web browser and, to create a product stack, users only require a NASA EarthData login and approved access to the HyP3 website. The final product the user downloads could be up to hundreds of times smaller.

Thus the tool provides an easy way for users around the world to generate time series products quickly and easily; quickly, because the RTC and InSAR products necessary for the time series product are generated in parallel using the highly scalable HyP3 system, and easily because the user need only download their final time series product and does not need to deal with installation and configuration of notoriously difficult SAR processing software.