SWB: An analysis and visualization tool for COSMO SkyMed

With the increase of the availability of high quality data for Earth Observation (EO), and SAR in particular, it is even more important to have advanced applications that can exploit this great amount of data.Also it is important to have software (SW) tools that allow scientists and engineers to process and analyze data, and to develop innovative applications."SAR WorkBench" (SWB) is a SW for the fast visualization/browsing, analysis and post processing of multi-mission EO data.It was developed in the framework of one of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) projects for COSMO SkyMed data exploitation and has, among others, some features that are very peculiar like the Quality Analysis ones.SWB has a modular architecture and it is extendible via plug-ins.It can be programmed in an high level programming language, close to the ones scientists are used to, and do not requires expensive SW licenses.In this paper, it is presented an overview of the SW and its architecture and some examples of data analysis performed with SWB.