NISAR mission data products are generated by JPL and archived by ASF. These products, described in the Data Products section, are hosted in NASA’s Earthdata Cloud (EDC), which uses AWS infrastructure. This allows users to leverage cloud-based access and computation workflows, though the products can also be downloaded to local storage.
There are a range of access options available for NISAR, supporting a range of use cases.
Map-based Web Applications¶
Map-based web interfaces make it easy to explore data available for a particular geographic location and visualize the extent and characteristics of the products.
ASF’s Vertex data search site is optimized for searching NASA’s SAR holdings
NASA’s Earthdata Search provides access to all of NASA’s Earth observation datasets
Vertex¶
Vertex was developed by ASF to facilitate search and discovery for NASA’s SAR datasets. To search for NISAR datasets specifically, select NISAR from the Dataset menu. Click the Filters button to expose additional parameters that can be used to narrow your search.
Because search parameters of interest for SAR differ from other types of Earth observation data, it can be helpful to use a platform that is tailored to the parameters and characteristics of SAR data. This is particularly useful for those who are less familiar with SAR data products and may need more guidance to find the appropriate dataset for their use case.
Refer to the Vertex User Manual for more guidance on search capabilities.
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Earthdata Search¶
Earthdata Search allows users to search for all of NASA’s Earth observation datasets in one place.
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Programmatic Access¶
The global and reliable regular coverage of the NISAR mission makes it a compelling data source for big data analysis workflows. SAR data is often integrated into complex scripts to perform additional processing and time series analysis, and NISAR data access can be scripted into existing programmatic workflows.
As with the web-based user interfaces, ASF provides programmatic access patterns tailored to SAR datasets, but NISAR data can also be accessed using programmatic tools developed to support a wide range of NASA Earth observation data resources.
ASF provides the asf_search Python package to streamline the process of finding and accessing suitable SAR datasets for a time period and area of interest
The earthaccess Python package provides programmatic access to a range of NASA Earth observation datasets
ASF Search Python Package¶
The asf_search Python package allows users to search and download products for all of ASF’s data collections. It also provides support for compiling lists of SAR acquisitions that are suitable for interferometric time series analysis and other SAR-specific functionality.
Refer to the ASF Data Search Manual to learn about installation options and how to use asf_search to find and download all of ASF’s SAR holdings.
Learn more about searching for NISAR datasets with the ASF Search Python Package!
Earthaccess Python Package¶
The earthaccess Python package allows users to access NASA Earth observation datasets programmatically. The development of this package is facilitated by NASA Openscapes, an initiative to support researchers using data hosted in NASA’s Earthdata Cloud.
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