A GeoNode-Based Platform for an Effective Exploitation of Advanced DInSAR Measurements

Abstract

This work presents the development of an efficient tool for managing, visualizing, analysing, and integrating with other data sources, the deformation time-series obtained by applying the advanced differential interferometric synthetic aperture radar (DInSAR) techniques. To implement such a tool we extend the functionalities of GeoNode, which is a web-based platform providing an open source framework based on the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards, that allows development of Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) and Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). In particular, our efforts have been dedicated to enable the GeoNode platform to effectively analyze and visualize the spatio/temporal characteristics of the DInSAR deformation time-series and their related products. Moreover, the implemented multi-thread based new functionalities allow us to efficiently upload and update large data volumes of the available DInSAR results into a dedicated geodatabase. The examples we present, based on Sentinel-1 DInSAR results relevant to Italy, demonstrate the effectiveness of the extended version of the GeoNode platform.which properly combine the information available from a set of multi-temporal SAR acquisitions relevant to an area of interest, in order to compute the deformation time-series [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34].Currently, the DInSAR scenario is characterized by a huge availability of SAR data acquired during the last 25 years, comprising the long-term C-band European Space Agency (ESA) archives (e.g., ERS-1, ERS-2, and ENVISAT), the RADARSAT-1 and RADARSAT-2 C-band data sequences, those provided by the L-band ALOS and ALOS-2 sensors and by the X-band generation of SAR sensors, such as the COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) and TerraSAR-X constellations. Moreover, a massive and ever increasing data flow is currently supplied by the C-band Sentinel-1 (S1) constellation of the European Copernicus program [35,36] that is composed of twin SAR satellites, Sentinel-1A and Sentinel-1B, which were launched on April 2014 and April 2016, respectively, and are specifically oriented to DInSAR applications, for the imaging of land surfaces [36].This Big Data DInSAR scenario needs the development of advanced methodologies and techniques to manage, visualize and analyze these data, and to integrate them with other sources. In this context the Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) may play a key role because they implement a framework of geographic data, metadata, users and tools that are interactively connected [37]. Moreover, a SDI is relevant because it represents a collection of technologies, policies, standards, human resources, and related activities permitting the acquisition, processing, distribution, use, maintenance, and preservation of spatial data [38]. We remark that in the SDI framework the technologies used have significantly changed over time and will certainly continue to evolve, thus implying a significant effort to integrate distributed data among the geospatial data producers, to fully benefit from new technologies. The O...

The Monitoring and Analysis of Land Subsidence in Kunming (China) Supported by Time Series InSAR

“…However, these surveys have several limitations (e.g., high cost, small monitoring scope, and rigorous requirements for monitoring environment), so large-area monitoring results are difficult to obtain efficiently. In contrast with conventional deformation monitoring methods, Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (DInSAR) [8][9][10] developed rapidly in the past 30 years. It is widely used in urban surface subsidence monitoring [11][12][13], landslide disaster identification [14,15], earthquake deformation monitoring [16][17][18] and other geological disaster fields [19] because of its large space coverage, short revisit period, high spatial resolution, high deformation monitoring accuracy, all-day, all-weather, no personnel to reach the disaster or subsidence area for direct measurement and so on [20,21].…”

An Open-Source Web Platform to Share Multisource, Multisensor Geospatial Data and Measurements of Ground Deformation in Mountain Areas

“…With respect to these ones, an important additional feature is represented by the data association with metadata. Software as GeoNetwork and GeoNode appear more complete in this sense, providing a valid technology compliant with the internationally recognized standards (e.g., OGC) to improve managing, sharing and also analyzing data and metadata in a unique way [7,40]. A great added value is also represented by the possibility of producing graphs of the raw data, allowing an in-depth analysis of the collected measurements.…”

Automatic Generation of Sentinel-1 Continental Scale DInSAR Deformation Time Series through an Extended P-SBAS Processing Pipeline in a Cloud Computing Environment

“…Moreover, as soon as the processing of one frame is completed on a computing node, it launches a new query to the archive in order to proceed with the next S-1 frame. The final results can be visualized and analyzed through appropriate GIS and WebGIS platforms [30].…”