An overview of the PACRIM 2000 Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (AIRSAR) mission in the Pacific, Australia and Asian region

PACRIM 2 is a NASA-Australia sponsored science program whose primary purpose is to advance the development and use of polarimetric and interferometric radar in Pacific Rim countries including island nations of the South Pacific, New Zealand, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and the United States. The deployment of AIRSAR on board NASA's DC-8 research aircraft has provided an opportunity to investigators with diverse backgrounds to collect, analyze and apply state-of-the-art data for Earth science studies in preparation for datasets likely to become available in the near future from satellite and commercial airborne systems.