Atmospherically corrected deformation at a prominent‑topography volcano: Teide-Pico Viejo volcano, Tenerife, Canary Islands (2015–2025)

Steep relief and nearby ocean influenced weather patterns at Teide–Pico Viejo volcano create strong, elevation‑correlated tropospheric delays that can obscure millimetric ground motion in C‑band InSAR. We applied a robust workflow to isolate true deformation at Teide (2015–2025) by combining multi‑geometry Sentinel‑1 time series. Our pipeline integrates (i) ascending/descending TOPS stacks processed with SBAS method; (ii) numerical weather model corrections (e.g., ERA5‑based slant delays using PyAPS) to remove water‑vapor structure; and (iii) Common-mode filtering to minimize atmospheric residuals due a single deformation reference area (Mohammadnia et al., 2025). Finally, we recovered 3‑D deformation fields by combining information from 3 line‑of‑sight geometries. The atmospheric-corrected solutions substantially suppress topography‑correlated variance and reveal coherent, low‑amplitude deformation that otherwise would have been misinterpreted as larger magnitude volcanic deformation. The emergent pattern is dominated by slow, millimeters per year, deformation since 2022. Signals are superimposed with centimetric seasonal vertical signals. Our results demonstrate that rigorous atmospheric corrections are essential to recover sub-centimeter deformation spanning multiple years at high‑relief volcanoes to isolate magmatic-hydrothermal pressurization signals. 

References:
Mohammadnia, M., Yip, M.W., Webb, A.A.G., González, P.J. (2025) Spontaneous transient summit uplift at Taftan volcano (Makran subduction arc) imaged using an InSAR common-mode filtering method, Geophysical Research Letters, doi:10.1029/2025GL114853

Acknowledgements: We thank Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación project PID2022-139159NB-I00 (Volca-Motion) funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and “FEDER Una manera de hacer Europa”.