Alaska SAR Facility: The US Science Center for Sea Ice SAR Data

Abstract

In 1985 NASA approved the Alaska SAR Facility (ASF) at the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). The implementation was to be a joint effort between UAF and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The objective of ASF was and is to supply scientific and operational data users with calibrated, timely satellite SAR data. In 1991 ASF began to receive data from the First European Remote Sensing Satellite (ERS-1), in 1992 from the Japanese First Earth Resources Satellite (JERS-i), in 1995 from the ERS-i follow-on, ERS-2, and in 1996 from the Canadian RADARSAT. In 1992 NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) formed a joint initiative to implement at McMurdo Base in Antarctica a satellite receiving station capable of acquiring and recording data from SAR satellites, and in January, 1995, this installation was complete; the McMurdo Ground Station is now operational and is acquiring data from ERS-i and -2 and RADARSAT. Two research opportunities for analysis of ASF data have been published, the most recent in 1995, and there are about 175 approved projects for science and applications work with ASF data. Two particularly interesting polar regions mapping projects are planned for RADARSAT in the immediate future: the weekly mapping of the Arctic ice-covered water, which will be further processed into geophysical variables by the RADARSAT Geophysical Processor System (RGPS), and two complete mappings of Antarctica in the RADARSAT Antarctic Mapping Project (RAMP). These activities are discussed further below.