Real time ground deformation monitoring from satellites to reduce risk of damage to utilities and pipelines

Several years ago I blogged previously about an application that used Sentinel-1 radar interferometry to monitor ground displacements with millimetre precision to look for subsidence which might be evidence of a leak in a municipal water system. Now access to data and processing algorithms are available to developers to create workflows to monitor ground deformation to reduce the risk of damage to underground Infrastructure including utilities, oil, gas and water transmission pipelines and associated industrial plants.

Ground movement represents a significant risk to linear structures such as utility, pipeline, and transportation networks as well as to large scale industrial and commercial structures.  Traditionally ground deformation is monitored by fixed high accuracy GNSS stations located at intervals and by periodic surveys along alignments.  Both of these are expensive and are limited by geospatial and temporal gaps. Satellites such as Sentinel-1 that use radar to image the earth are capable of radar interferometry (INSAR) which allows ground deformations on the order of cm and even mm to be detected.  The revisit times for these satellites are on the order of days and the radar antennas on these satellites allow very large areas to be monitored for deformations.  For example, Sentinel-1 is capable of detecting deformations of a few mm over an area of 42,500 km² with a 12 day revisit time. Furthermore INSAR data is available stretching back to the mid 1990's making it possible to monitor historical ground movement over quite long time periods.

UP42 provides the infrastructure of an enterprise software development and deployment platform enabling developers to create scale-able workflows using satellite imagery and customized algorithms. In a recent UP42 webinar (53 minutes in), Shawn Melamed and Sarah Thompson of CATALYST (PCI Geomatics) showed how innovative INSAR technology has made it possible to cost effectively continuously monitor ground deformation along thousands of km of  a linear structure such as a utility, pipeline, or transportation network.  The data can be sourced from any of the satellites capable of INSAR including Sentinel-1 (free) and TerraSAR-X (commercial).  An example is provided in the talk of the development of a UP42 workflow for detecting uneven land subsidence in California resulting from agricultural withdrawals of water from an aquifer that potentially could damage a power plant located in the area.  The code to perform this analysis is available as the Ground Displacement Block on the UP42 marketplace.