The RUS - Research and User support for Sentinel core products - is an initiative funded by the European Commission and managed by ESA with the objective to promote the uptake of Copernicus Sentinel data and support R&D activities. It is a free and open service offering not only powerful computational environment - in the form of customized Virtual Machines
(VMs) pre-installed with wide variety of open source toolboxes - but also EO expertise and support for application-specific data selection, data processing and visualization as well as algorithm development and scaling-up to large amount of Sentinel products.
This short course will demonstrate the usage of the Open Tools available within the RUS environment in a practical case. Focus of the training will be the exploitation of Sentinel-1 (SAR) interferometric data for Land Subsidence monitoring using the ESA SNAP ToolBox. The session will consist of two sections. The first part will consist of a 30 minutes introduction aiming to provide scientific background on land subsidence monitoring using InSAR and will also a shortly illustrate the free RUS service. The second part will last one hour and will be a practical demonstration provided by the trainer of the processing steps needed to derive subsidence information from Sentinel-1 data. Participants will be provided with information how to request free RUS virtual machines pre-loaded with all the software and data necessary to repeat the exercise at their leisure.
Application: Land subsidence caused by natural or anthropogenic factors represents a significant environmental problem in many areas of the world which continuously grows in importance. Land subsidence apart from causing damage to infrastructures (i.e. buildings, roadways, pipelines etc.), it may increase the vulnerability to other geohazards.