GENERATION OF VISUALIZATION TOOLS FOR THE RGPS


Background. The RADARSAT Geophysical Processor System (RGPS) is currently in development by a R. Kwok and a team at JPL with scientific leadership by the RGPS Working Group led by D. Rothrock of the University of Washington and R. Kwok. The RGPS will ingest RADARSAT SAR coverage of the entire Arctic Ocean from ASF, and other data, and produce geophysical fields. At a previous progress/design review it was determined that visualization tools were not being developed by any of the participants, and it was determined that ASF should perform this task. There are 12 weekly output products, 1 twice per year product, and three twice-daily input fields; these fields total to about 25 GB/a. All of these are to be addressed for user visualization.

ASF Science maintains a collection of software tools under the guidance of the ASF User Working Group (see http://www.asf.alaska.edu/). Thus, the project described here is an expansion of that activity, and the expansion is required because of 2 factors, one is the pressure from the UWG to make SAR interferometry software available, and the other is the lack, in the ASF Science Program, of a specialist in visualization technology. We plan to have this software module implemented by a UAF graduate student working with a faculty member (part-time), and we feel that this approach to getting a visualization tool is both cost-effective and timely.


RPGSview: A Tool for RGPS Data Visualization
     IEEE IGARSS 2000 Proceedings, pp 3006-3008, July, 2000 (108K PDF file).

RGPS Visualization Project

RGPS Visualization Tools Schedule

ASF Data Types Catalog

RGPS Visualization Tools Proposal

New York Times Article (Sept 3, 1996)

GEOS 662: Theory and Applications of Satellite SAR Interferometry