NASA’s Applied Remote Sensing Training Program: Building Capacity in Using Earth Science Data for Decision Making

NASA’s Applied Remote Sensing Training (ARSET) program, established 15 years ago, aims to empower the global community to leverage open source Earth System (ES) data for decision-making across various sectors. These sectors include air quality and health, agriculture, climate and resilience, disaster management (such as floods, droughts, wildfires, extreme heat and cold, and landslides), ecological conservation, and water resources. ARSET provides online and in-person trainings focused on societal applications using data from satellites, and weather and climate models. Trainings also integrate socioeconomic, infrastructure, and humanitarian data to augment management practices and data-driven decision-making systems. Our learning experiences include presentations on different open source data products, demonstrations of portals and web tools for data access and analysis, and hands-on exercises involving regional and thematic case studies. Post-training surveys are conducted to gather feedback to identify benefits and challenges in using ES data for decision support and to inform future training topics and teaching strategies. To date, ARSET has trained approximately 130,000 participants from 182 countries. This presentation will provide an overview of the ARSET program, training development process, and highlight examples and impacts of ARSET trainings on extreme weather events and climate change monitoring and impact assessments using ES data.