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Full catalog/nisar
nisar·dataset

NISAR — the NASA-India radar that sees through cloud

NISAR — NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar
hydrosphere ISRO/NASA ASF DAAC active
In plain English

What it measures. Ground deformation (millimetre-scale), surface change, floods, soil moisture, crop and forest structure, and ice motion — using radar that works day, night and through cloud and rain.

How it's made. A joint NASA-ISRO satellite carrying two radars (L-band from NASA, S-band from ISRO), imaging the whole land surface and ice sheets every ~12 days.

How & where you'd use it. The single most useful new dataset for India: monsoon-proof flood mapping, land subsidence (Joshimath, Kolkata), earthquake deformation, crop monitoring and forest biomass — and openly accessible via NASA, unlike most Indian-portal data.

What's measured

SARL-bandS-banddeformationInSARISRONASAradarfloodbiomass

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2024-01-01 → ongoing
  • Spatial extent-180, -85, 180, 85

What you can do with it

  • Follow rainfall, floods and surface-water extent
  • Track soil moisture and the onset of drought
  • Monitor lakes, rivers and groundwater storage
Official description

The joint NASA-ISRO L- and S-band radar mission imaging nearly all of Earth's land and ice every 12 days. Because it is a NASA partner mission, NISAR data are openly distributed through NASA Earthdata (ASF DAAC) — no Indian-portal registration required.

Get the data

nisar_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="nisar",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from ASF DAAC
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.