NISAR Quality Assurance for L-Band Level-1 and Level-2 Science Products

For NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission processing, Quality Assurance (QA) plots, metrics, and summary statistics will be produced by the NISAR Science Data System (SDS) in human- and machine-readable formats for each level-1 (L1) and level-2 (L2) science data product and made freely and openly available for users. It is expected that NISAR will generate millions of individual science data products, with each product ranging in size from a few hundred MB to over 40 GB, for approximately 100 PB added to the NASA data archives over the nominal 3 year mission. This volume will be the largest of any NASA mission to date; it creates a need for automated checks and for each product to be digested into smaller, summary statistics and plots for quick review. This need will be addressed by the QA software, which will be run at scale as part of nominal NISAR mission processing on each L1/L2 data product. QA will generate small, standalone, human- and/or machine-parsable files that will be freely available from the Alaska Satellite Facility Distributed Active Archive Center (ASF DAAC) alongside the primary L1/L2 NISAR products. This paper introduces the QA output files, their content and formats, and the usage of QA in the context of NISAR mission processing. In the era of big data, these smaller files could be a significant firststep towards analyzing broad trends across the large, primary L1/L2 NISAR datasets.