While Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) remote sensing with its weather independence and day-and-night capabilities has long been identified as a useful data set for many science disciplines, it is only due to a number of recent developments that SAR has also become an attractive resource for practitioners and decision-makers in areas such as disaster management, agricultural monitoring, water resource management, and ecosystem sustainability.

New sensors such as Sentinel-1 and the upcoming NASA-ISRO SAR mission (NISAR) are now providing free and open access to globally and regularly sampled SAR data. New software and processing algorithms are providing value-added products that come fully geocoded and in easy to read data formats. All of these changes have led to increased demand for SAR data and to a vast diversification of the SAR user community. They have also resulted in a pressing need for a more diverse library of training resources, webinars, and curricula. This is particularly true for the applications and decision-making communities, whose information needs are not well met by currently available training material.

Building on these identified needs, this town hall will bring together members of the remote sensing capacity building community with representatives from global practitioner and decision-making organizations to advance the breadth and effectiveness of capacity building in the field of SAR. Short presentations on recent developments in SAR capacity building and on the data and education needs of the practitioners communities will be followed by an open town hall discussion with a small panel of experts. Input collected from this town hall will inform future capacity building efforts in this important and rapidly growing earth observation field.