Systematic and automatic ground deformation monitoring via space-borne DInSAR techniques

The large availability of SAR data from several space-borne constellations is contributing to shift the interest of the geohazard community towards the implementation of operational services for the generation of advanced interferometric products (e.g. displacement maps, deformation time series), which can be very useful for risk management and natural hazard monitoring. In this context, a crucial role is played by the European Copernicus Sentinel-1 (S1) constellation that, with its global acquisition policy, has literally flooded the scientific community with a huge amount of data acquired over large part of the Earth on a regular basis (down to 6-days with both Sentinel-1A and 1B passes). The S1 data are openly and freely accessible, thus fostering their use for the development of automated and systematic tools for Earth surface monitoring, with particular reference to the ground deformation applications. In this work we present the activities carried out for the development of a CNR-IREA automatic InSAR service based on S1 data. The service consists on the systematic processing of S1 data on selected areas of interest, to generate updated surface displacement time series every time a new S1 acquisition is available. The system exploits the Parallel version of the Small BAseline Subset-InSAR algorithm (P-SBAS) and is automatically triggered by the new acquisition availability. As additional feature, the system is able to retrieve the on-line real-time earthquake information to automatically generate an InSAR co-seismic displacement map once a major earthquake occurs. The implemented service is already running to monitor the Italian Campi Flegrei and Etna volcanoes for Civil Protection purposes. Moreover, it has also been integrated within the Abstract ID: 1046 for Cities on Volcanoes 10 (Auto-Generated May 18, 2018 3:09 pm) Copyright 2018 Cities on Volcanoes 10 ESA GEP platform and is available for the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) Research Infrastructure community. The proposed system can be extended to include additional processing tools, as those able to model the causative sources of the observed displacements.