Over one million displacement products from ARIA and counting: Enabling open-science and disaster response for everyone

Abstract

<p>Major geological hazards can devastate essential infrastructure and result in widespread injury and death. Understanding the underlying processes that can lead to these hazards and providing analysis-ready datasets in a timely fashion is crucial for hazard monitoring and disaster response and recovery efforts. In support of NASA's vision, we are committed to an open-source science initiative enabling the transparency, inclusivity and accessibility, and reproducibility of  Earth observation data – all fundamental to the pace and quality of scientific progress. Under a NASA ACCESS effort, we have: 1) significantly lowered the latency of delivering displacement products, i.e. the Sentinel-1 Geocoded Unwrapped (S1-GUNW) products, and 2) enabled the expansion of the displacement data archive to over one million S1-GUNW products, currently making ARIA one of the largest open InSAR archives spanning continental scales across most major active tectonic and volcanic regions (Sangha et al., 2022). The scientific analysis of these products is streamlined via the open-source ARIA-tools, which simplifies the download and preparation of S1-GUNWs for time-series analysis through the open-source MintPy software (Yunjun et al., 2019). The derived datasets can support science applications as well as timely science-driven decision-making efforts, particularly, after or during disaster and recovery periods.</p> <p>Here we demonstrate how our updated infrastructure, driven by an open-source Hybrid Pluggable Processing Pipeline (HyP3) cloud architecture, can be leveraged to support open science and disaster response applications ranging from analysis of volcanic unrest and earthquakes, to characterizing broader-scale tectonic processes.</p>

Localized uplift, widespread subsidence, and implications for sea level rise in the New York City metropolitan area

“…In addition, InSAR can reveal hitherto undocumented hot spots, such as the uplift observed at Newton Creek, that can support future scientific investigations into surface geology and assessments of engineering projects. While specialized expertise is still required for InSAR processing, this is rapidly changing as InSAR standard products become widely available (30) and the upcoming release of a North American line-of-sight (LoS) displacement derived from SAR observations by the OPERA project. This will be further enhanced in the coming years with observations from the joint NA-SA-Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission, which will observe the U.S. coasts every 12 days with an L-Band sensor better capable of penetrating vegetation than Sentinel-1.…”

The evolving deformation field in central Afar from two decades of InSAR observations: Implications for the decoupling between the upper and lower crusts

“…In this study, we use the data from ascending tracks 14 and 116, and descending tracks 79 and 6 (Table S5). We specifically use standardized Sentinel-1 ARIA (Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis) InSAR products created and distributed through cloud computing services by the JPL ARIA group (Sangha et al, 2019;Buzzanga et al, 2020). While the current archive of ARIA products is su cient to investigate the velocity field spanning the Afar Depression, it is too sparse to observe smaller scale deformation patterns associated with aseismic microfaulting events on faults.…”

“…We used the ARIA toolbox (Sangha et al, 2019;Buzzanga et al, 2020) to stitch the ARIA products into swaths and format them properly for ingestion into the opensource MintPy (Miami INsar Time-series software in PYthon) (Yunjun et al, 2019) timeseries formation software. The current archive of ARIA-products is su cient to constrain the regional-scale velocity fields spanning the Afar Depression, but the spatial resolution of the multi-looked products and the pairs network they define is currently not optimized to image the small deformation features associated with fault creep.…”