ADATools: a set of tools for the analysis of terrain movement maps obtained with SAR Interferometry

Abstract

The SAR Interferometry techniques, Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) among them, are nowadays known as important tools for monitoring Earth surface movements. Several regional and national Ground Motion Services based on PSI already exist. Moreover, since 2022 the European Ground Motion Service will be operational and will annually provide an updated displacement map over the whole Europe. This will suppose a big amount of ground displacement measurements along the European territory. For each measurement EGMS will provide the annual velocity and the time series of deformation covering the period 2014 to one year prior to each delivery. In this context, it will be more and more necessary having tools to ease the management, analysis, and interpretation, of those wide areas and huge amount of data. We present here a first step in this direction: the ADATools are a set of tools to automatically have secondary, and more operational, products derived from a PSI map. Starting from a fast extraction of the most significant Active Deformation Areas (ADA), with the ADAFinder tool, then we can have a preliminary classification of the most probable phenomena (landslides, subsidence, settlements, or sinkholes) that is behind the detected movement, with the ADAClassifier tool. Moreover, LOS2hv tool allows to derive the horizontal (east-west) and vertical components of the movement in case we have maps of ascending and descending geometries. Finally, it is presented a product that analyzes the local displacement gradients to generate potential damage maps in urban areas. The tools will be presented thorough some results obtained on an area of the Granada County with the use of Sentinel-1 data. All the results have been achieved within the framework of the Riskcoast Project (financed by the Interreg Sudoe Program through the European Regional Development Fund, ERDF).