1. LiCSAR: An Automatic InSAR Tool for Measuring and Monitoring Tectonic and Volcanic Activity
- Author
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Richard J. Walters, C. Scott Watson, Yasser Maghsoudi, Fabien Albino, Jonathan R. Weiss, Daniel Juncu, Nicholas Greenall, Milan Lazecký, Emma Hatton, Pablo J. González, Alistair McDougall, Andrew Hooper, Yu Morishita, Tim J. Wright, Karsten Spaans, John Elliott, and University of Leeds
- Subjects
Synthetic aperture radar ,geology ,010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences ,Computer science ,Science ,0211 other engineering and technologies ,0207 environmental engineering ,Automatic processing ,02 engineering and technology ,Volcanism ,010502 geochemistry & geophysics ,01 natural sciences ,Deformation monitoring ,SAR Interferometry ,Interferometric synthetic aperture radar ,020701 environmental engineering ,0105 earth and related environmental sciences ,Remote sensing ,021101 geological & geomatics engineering ,geography ,geography.geographical_feature_category ,Tectonics ,Sentinel-1 ,deformation monitoring ,tectonics ,volcanism ,automatic processing ,Interferometry ,Volcano ,Geocoding ,General Earth and Planetary Sciences ,Seismology ,Geology - Abstract
Space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Interferometry (InSAR) is now a key geophysical tool for surface deformation studies. The European Commission’s Sentinel-1 Constellation began acquiring data systematically in late 2014. The data, which are free and open access, have global coverage at moderate resolution with a 6 or 12-day revisit, enabling researchers to investigate large- scale surface deformation systematically through time. However, full exploitation of the potential of Sentinel-1 requires specific processing approaches as well as the efficient use of modern computing and data storage facilities. Here we present LiCSAR, an operational system built for large-scale interferometric processing of Sentinel-1 data. LiCSAR is designed to automatically produce geocoded wrapped and unwrapped interferograms and coherence estimates, for large regions, at 0.001° resolution (WGS-84 system). The products are continuously updated in a frequency depending on prioritised regions (monthly, weekly or live update strategy). The products are open and freely accessible and downloadable through an online portal. We describe the algorithms, processing, and storage solutions implemented in LiCSAR, and show several case studies that use LiCSAR products to measure tectonic and volcanic deformation. We aim to accelerate the uptake of InSAR data by researchers as well as non-expert users by mass producing interferograms and derived products., This work was partially undertaken on ARC4, part of the High Performance Computing facilities at the University of Leeds, UK.
- Published
- 2020