Spaceborne SAR Interferometry Exploitation for Longitudinal Ground Deformation Monitoring

Multi-temporal Interferometric SAR (InSAR) is a promising modality for spaceborne analysis of ground and structure deformations for predictive alerting. With increasing deployments of highly capable commercial satellites offering high spectral and spatial resolution, global coverage and site revisit rates, predictive structural instability/integrity assessment is becoming accessible at a fraction of cost of aerial and ground based solutions. This paper presents an overview of the opportunities and challenges in affordably monitoring new and longstanding large buildings, monuments and ground infrastructure. This is necessitated by increasingly intense exploitation of environmental resources, hydrogeological instabilities and risk of natural disasters in environments perturbed by human activities that has created new risks. Planetek's Rheticus® Displacement (RD) solution provides actionable, accurate assessment of land subsidence and slow changes. The underlying SPINUA (Stable Point Interferometry Even Over Unurbanized Areas) technique has already been shown to be robust in non- and scarcely urbanized areas. The talk will provide an overview of InSAR usage and multitemporal analysis processing chain to estimate ground displacement and velocity, including results from well-characterized distributed scatterers. New results are presented that combine Quantum Resonance Interferometry (QRI) SNR and SCR enhancement processing within RD computational pipeline for extending the reliability of displacement computations to complex, vegetated ground topography and reducing the number of ground fiducials. New results are presented on dataset acquired using ESA's Sentinel-l C-band InSAR instrument (with revisit time of 6 days) with high swath-width over a site in Southern Italy. QRI-enhanced displacement maps, compared in terms of the density of measured coherent targets and the precision of the estimated velocity, will be provided. The paper will discuss the utility of improved InSAR processing in all-weather, early warning land hazard monitoring satellite system.