The Alaska SAR Facility: overview and key geophysical applications

The Alaska SAR Facility (ASF) is the NASA Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) that provides SAR (synthetic aperture radar) data and data products to polar and Earth systems science communities and to operational agencies. ASF currently supports the ERS-1 and ERS-2 flown by the European Space Agency (ESA), JERS-1 flown by the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA), and RADARSAT flown by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). ASF receives and archives SAR data for the US user community from ground stations at ASF and McMurdo base in Antarctica. ASF provides new acquisitions and archival data for many important geophysical disciplines, including sea ice, polar oceanography, volcanology, glaciology, wetlands ecosystems, forestry, geology, and oceanography. Examples of large scale campaigns or intense mapping projects are the Antarctic Mapping Mission, Global Rain Forest Mapping Project, and the Global Boreal Forest Mapping Project. This special session highlights these key disciplines and mapping campaigns. The paper provides an overview of the SAR sensors, product characteristics, data availability and ordering procedures. Also, the paper discusses software tools for users and planning for future sensors and activities.