Authors
Joel Johnson (CIRES), Kristy Tiampo (CIRES), Michael Willis (CIRES), Magali Barba (CIRES)

Abstract

The recent growth in access to Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data through the European Space Agency (ESA) Sentinel-1A/B satellites and upcoming NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission provide increased opportunities for interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) monitoring. Although a wealth of data is now available, processing software licenses are often cost prohibitive. Existing open source options having a steep learning curve, after which months of processing time is often necessary to produce research. We combined open source processing software InSAR Scientific Computing Environment (ISCE), a Docker container developed by the Alaskan Satellite Facility (ASF), and a software wrapper to allow large scale parallel processing of SAR images through the Rocky Mountain Advanced Computing Consortium (RMACC) Summit supercomputer at the University of Colorado Boulder. We modified the original ASF Docker because it was incompatible with Summit, and did not allow for the usage of a higher resolution DEM, defaulting to those available from the Shuttle Topography Radar Mission (SRTM) with 30-meter pixel resolution. We employ freely available tools in the creation of a software wrapper that allows updates to InSAR time series in near real time, bypassing common issues in installation, updates, and processing. This workflow will vastly simplify InSAR analysis in both setup and processing time, allowing for a greater ease of access and a focus on the resulting science for scientists across CU, CIRES and the broader community. Here we provide preliminary results as an example.