Making Sar Accessible: Education & Training in Preparation for Nisar

Abstract

Since the launch of the Sentinel-1, the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) user community has grown exponentially, adding a large group of users to the field that have only limited experience with the peculiarities of SAR and interferometric SAR (InSAR) data. This paper summarizes some of the recent education and training activities that were initiated by the members of the U.S. SAR science community to help these new user communities build expertise in the use of SAR. The focus is put on initiatives related to the upcoming NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) mission, whose globally-acquired, free-and-open L-band SAR data will facilitate a wide range of new science and applications activities. We introduce a set of independent, yet interrelated capacity building projects aimed at developing educational materials for different segments of the SAR user community. The paper also references recently-developed cloud-based training tools and recent education and training events.