NASA's Alaska Satellite Facility Distributed Active Archive Center (ASF DAAC) developed the OpenSARLab service to remove common obstacles that data users may encounter as they learn how to access and work with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. SAR datasets are large files—which is important when considering data download and storage options. Once a scientist has his or her data, working with the data can require the installation of complicated computing environments. OpenSARLab aims to improve upon computing environment capabilities by providing free, limited access to a cloud-hosted Jupyter Hub that sits alongside ASF data archives in Amazon Web Services (AWS), making the transfer of SAR data to users’ persistent storage volumes fast and free.

Additional benefits of OpenSARLab include access to an open library of data recipes in the form of Jupyter Notebooks—allowing users to explore a variety of SAR data analysis techniques. ASF also provides extendable software environments (via Conda), which enables users to skip the convoluted setup process and start working with data right away.

For research teams and classes, ASF provides custom OpenSARLab deployments, allowing geographically dispersed teams access to identical environments from a web browser. Time is not wasted debugging software installations, and final processing results are the same for all users. Custom deployments are tailored by use-case to offer the exact computational resources required and avoid unnecessary AWS costs.

In this webinar, participants will be provided with an introduction to OpenSARLab and a live demonstration of how to use OpenSARLab to work with SAR data in the cloud.