On the exploitation of the Sentinel-1 P-SBAS service within the EarthConsole® platform for unsupervised on-demand DInSAR processing

The current remote sensing scenario is nowadays characterized by an extensive exploitation of spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data to investigate the Earth surface dynamics. Such a request is rather well satisfied by the huge archives collected in the last ten years by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 (S1) SAR mission, which is distinguished by a “free and open” access data policy and a nearly global coverage acquisition strategy. In this regard, the most used space-borne geodetic technique for the investigation of the ground deformation is Differential Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (DInSAR) that has largely demonstrated its effectiveness in measuring surface displacements in different scenarios. In particular, the advanced DInSAR method referred to as Parallel Small BAseline Subset (P-SBAS) approach has emerged as particularly effective to examine the temporal evolution of the detected surface displacements both in natural and anthropogenic hazard contexts, such as volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides and human-induced deformation due to mining activities, fluids exploitation, and large infrastructures construction.

In this context, the availability to the scientific community of algorithms and tools suitable to effectively exploit such huge SAR data archives, for generating value added products, is becoming crucial. To this aim, the P-SBAS algorithm has been released as an on-demand web-based tool by integrating it within the EarthConsole® platform, and currently contributes to the on-demand remote sensing component of the EPOSAR service. More in detail, EarthConsole® is a cloud-based platform supporting the scientific community with the development, testing, and hosting of their processing applications to enable Earth Observation (EO) data exploitation and processing services. EPOSAR, instead, is a service available in the framework of the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) Satellite community, which provides systematic ground displacement products relevant to various areas on Earth.

In this work we present the deployment of the P-SBAS tool within the EarthConsole® platform, in order to extend the EPOSAR service portfolio to the on-demand generation of DInSAR displacement maps and time series exploiting C-band satellite data. In particular, the developed service builds up on the already available capability to carry out a multi-temporal DInSAR processing of ENVISAT data and allow the scientific users to process also Sentinel-1 SAR images in a fully autonomous manner, through a user-friendly web graphical interface which permits to them to follow the progress of the processing tasks and to avoid the need of the SAR data download on their own processing and archiving facilities. The availability for the EPOS community of such an on-demand P-SBAS-based DInSAR processing service, which allows the scientific users to retrieve in an unsupervised way and in very short time ground displacement maps and time series relevant to large areas, may open new intriguing and unexpected perspectives to the comprehension of the Earth surface deformation dynamics.