The ASF OpenSARLab A cloud-based (SAR) Remote Sensing Data Analysis Platform

The amount of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has been exploding in recent years, and much of it is free and open. With Sentinel-1 and the upcoming NISAR mission, scientists and applications users have a wealth of data available. This has introduced a challenge for the community, as managing all of the data is difficult; cumbersome to manage, time-consuming to download, and expensive to process. As part of ASFs mission to make remote sensing data accessible, ASF has built OpenSARlab in order to enable easy access to these large datasets in-place. OpenSARlab is a cloud-based processing environment based on Jupyter notebooks that allows programmatic access and manipulation of data directly in the cloud, and includes many tools in use by the SAR community. OpenSARlab enables collaborative development of algorithms and workflows in a flexible conda-based environment. Code and notebooks can be readily shared and versioned using github, and collaborating users are guaranteed to be working with the same set of libraries and tools. OpenSARlab is being used by the NISAR science development team to build standard processing workflows for data from this upcoming mission. ASF has used OpenSARlab to conduct a number of educational events during the past year. Its ideal for large, and especially virtual, training sessions since it is in the cloud and can scale to accommodate any number of simultaneous users. Each user has the same processing environment, so educational time is not wasted debugging software installations, and final processing results are the same for all users.