A brief overview of the open and interoperable National Satellite Ground Motion Service for the Italian territory developed through the GeosciencesIR initiative

The GeoSciencesIR project, funded through the Italian PNRR initiative, aims at establishing a dedicated research infrastructure for the Italian Network of Geological Surveys (RISG), enhancing collaboration between national and regional geological services. Coordinated by ISPRA and involving universities and research institutions across Italy, GeoSciencesIR focuses on harmonizing geological information and services within a cloud-based infrastructure designed in agreement with FAIR principles and INSPIRE standards. This infrastructure seeks to improve access to interoperable data and analysis tools for end users and fosters sustained capacity building and knowledge exchange within the Earth science community. Within this framework, the Institute for Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment of the Italian National Research Council (IREA-CNR) is leading the implementation of a national Satellite Ground Motion Service (SGMS) aimed at supporting Italian regional authorities, autonomous provinces and other institutional stakeholders.

This work is focused on presenting the SGMS, which has been designed to routinely generate ground displacement time series from the SAR images produced by the European Copernicus Sentinel-1 constellation (and, in the future, by other SAR missions like NISAR and ROSE-L). SGMS operates over the Italian territory with a three-month latency. By utilizing dedicated computing and storage resources, it achieves an update frequency for displacement time series three times higher than the European Ground Motion Service, while providing a spatial resolution of the final products of about 30 meters. Moreover, starting from the radar Line of Sight deformation measurements retrieved through the ascending and descending orbits SAR imaging, SGMS will provide displacement time series and mean velocity maps for the vertical and East-West deformation components. Moreover, all SGMS products are conceived to be openly accessible and fully compliant with the FAIR principles.

A key aspect of the SGMS is its strong complementarity and interoperability with European research infrastructures, particularly with the EPOS Satellite Data Thematic Core Service and its EPOSAR component. Both SGMS and EPOSAR are based on the P-SBAS DInSAR approach, ensuring methodological consistency and comparability of the derived deformation products. Within this framework, EPOSAR provides validated ground deformation products over selected areas of interest around the Earth supporting detailed scientific analyses, while SGMS delivers continuous and regular updates over the entire Italian territory, addressing operational and institutional monitoring needs at national and regional scales.

Furthermore, the adoption of FAIR principles and INSPIRE-compliant standards in the design of SGMS service, taking advantage of the EPOSAR experience, enables the full interoperability between the two services, allowing products to be shared, accessed and reused across platforms. This synergy not only enhances the overall informational content by enlarging the availability of satellite-derived deformation measurements and, in general, other geoscientific data, but also significantly broadens the user base, extending it from the scientific community to public bodies and national authorities.

 

This research was partially funded by HE EPOS-ON (GA 101131592) and the European Union-NextGeneratonEU through the GeoSciencesIR project – PNRR M4C2 Investimento 3.1 - IR00000037.