IT&I – Information Technology & Interoperability

Monthly on the second Thursday. Join via Zoom. All meetings are scheduled in U.S. Eastern Time Zone. Convert to your time zone.

The Information Technology and Interoperability (IT&I) webinar series is a monthly gathering dedicated to learning about new tools and techniques in Earth science data. The group is organized by the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) IT&I Committee alongside the USGS Community for Data Integration (CDI).

Title

PolSARtools: Accelerating Open Science in Radar Remote Sensing with Cloud-Native Polarimetric Processing

Abstract

Recent SAR missions such as NASA-ISRO SAR, BIOMASS, and Sentinel-1 deliver petabyte-scale Earth observation, but PolSAR data remains complex to process. PolSARtools, an open-source Python library and QGIS plugin, simplifies this by supporting multiple sensors and formats (Full, Compact, Dual-pol) to generate parameters such as decompositions, vegetation indices, and speckle filters. This session highlights how open development practices, reproducible pipelines, and community-driven design are transforming PolSAR from a specialized niche into a shared resource. We will wrap up with a live demonstration showing NISAR data processing and visualization using the polsartools.

Speaker bio

Dr. Bhogapurapu Narayanarao is an Assistant Professor in Civil Engineering at the National Institute of Technology, Warangal, India. He earned his Ph.D. in Geoinformatics and Natural Resources Engineering from IIT Bombay, where his award-winning doctoral work advanced soil moisture estimation using PolSAR data. He has held research appointments at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the California Institute of Technology. His research focuses on polarimetric and interferometric SAR techniques with applications in infrastructure, agriculture, and forestry. Dr. Narayanarao has received multiple honors, including the IEEE GRSS Mikio Takagi Student Prize (2022), IIT Bombay’s Excellence in Ph.D. Research Award (2021), Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, and the ISRS I-CON Silver Award (2025) for his contributions to open-source SAR data processing tools.

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