Building an InSAR-based database to support geohazard risk management by exploiting large ground deformation datasets

The detection of areas of the Earth’s surface experiencing active deformation processes and the identification of the responsible phenomena (e.g. landslides activated after rainy events, subsidence due to groundwater extraction in agricultural areas, consolidation settlements, instabilities in active or abandoned mines) is critical for geohazard risk management and ultimately to mitigate the unwanted effects on the affected populations and the environment.

This will now be possible at European level thanks to the Copernicus European Ground Motion Service (EGMS), which will provide ground displacement measurements derived from time series analyses of Sentinel-1 data, using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR). The EGMS, which will be available to users in the first quarter of 2022 and will be updated annually, will be especially useful to identify displacements associated to landslides, subsidence and deformation of infrastructure.  To fully exploit the capabilities of this large InSAR datasets, it is fundamental to develop automatic analysis tools, such as machine learning algorithms, which require an InSAR-derived deformation database to train and improve them.  

Here we present the preliminary InSAR-derived deformation database developed in the framework of the SARAI project, which incorporates the previous InSAR results of the IGME-InSARlab and CTTC teams in Spain. The database contains classified points of measurement with the associated InSAR deformation and a set of environmental variables potentially correlated with the deformation phenomena, such as geology/lithology, land-surface slope, land cover, meteorological data, population density, and inventories such as the mining registry, the groundwater database, and the IGME’s land movements database (MOVES). We discuss the main strategies used to identify and classify pixels and areas that are moving, the covariables used and some ideas to improve the database in the future. This work has been developed in the framework of project PID2020-116540RB-C22 funded by MCIN/ AEI /10.13039/501100011033 and e-Shape project, with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement 820852.