Automatic generation of Sentinel-1 continental scale DInSAR deformation time series through an extended P-SBAS processing pipeline in a cloud computing environment

We present in this work an advanced processing pipeline for continental scale differential synthetic aperture radar (DInSAR) deformation time series generation, which is based on the parallel small baseline subset (P-SBAS) approach and on the joint exploitation of Sentinel-1 (S-1) interferometric wide swath (IWS) SAR data, continuous global navigation satellite system (GNSS) position time-series, and cloud computing (CC) resources. We first briefly describe the basic rationale of the adopted P-SBAS processing approach, tailored to deal with S-1 IWS SAR data and to be implemented in a CC environment, highlighting the innovative solutions that have been introduced in the processing chain we present. They mainly consist in a series of procedures that properly exploit the available GNSS time series with the aim of identifying and filtering out possible residual atmospheric artifacts that may affect the DInSAR measurements. Moreover, significant efforts have been carried out to improve the P-SBAS processing pipeline automation and robustness, which represent crucial issues for interferometric continental scale analysis. Then, a massive experimental analysis is presented. In this case, we exploit: (i) the whole archive of S-1 IWS SAR images acquired over a large portion of Europe, from descending orbits, (ii) the continuous GNSS position time series provided by the Nevada Geodetic Laboratory at the University of Nevada, Reno, USA (UNR-NGL) available for the investigated area, and (iii) the ONDA platform, one of the Copernicus Data and Information Access Services (DIAS). The achieved results demonstrate the capability of the proposed solution to successfully retrieve the DInSAR time series relevant to such a huge area, opening new scenarios for the analysis and interpretation of these ground deformation measurements.