Wide-Area InSAR Survey of Surface Deformation in Urban Areas and Geothermal Fields in the Eastern Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, Mexico

Abstract

This paper provides the first wide-area Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) survey of the whole eastern Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt (42,200 km2). The aims are to identify ground deformation hotspots within major urbanized areas and rural valleys, establish baselines in geothermal exploration sites, and analyze deformation at geothermal exploitation sites and its relationship with energy production. The whole 2003–2010 ENVISAT C-band SAR archive available over the region was processed with the Small BAseline Subset (SBAS) InSAR method to retrieve over 840,000 coherent targets and estimate their ground displacement rates and time series. Land subsidence hotspots due to aquifer drawdown are found within the city of Puebla (up to −53 mm/year vertical rates, groundwater pumping for industrial use), Tlaxcala and Apizaco (−17 mm/year, industrial and public), the valley of Tecamachalco (−22 mm/year, agricultural), Tulancingo (−55 mm/year, public, industrial and agricultural), and in the eastern Mexico City metropolitan area (−44 mm/year, agricultural). The baseline for the Acoculco caldera complex shows widespread ground stability. Conversely, localized subsidence patterns of −5 to −10 mm/year exist around Las Derrumbadas and Cerro Pinto in the Serdán-Oriental basin, due to intense groundwater pumping for agriculture. A well-defined land subsidence area with −11 mm/year maximum rates is found at Los Humeros volcanic complex within Los Potreros collapse, correlating well with energy production infrastructure location and historical steam production rates. Field surveys carried out in Acoculco and Los Humeros in 2018 provide supporting evidence for the identification of hydrothermal manifestations, and understanding of the landscape and surface deformation patterns within the geothermal fields.

Sentinel-1 Big Data Processing with P-SBAS InSAR in the Geohazards Exploitation Platform: An Experiment on Coastal Land Subsidence and Landslides in Italy

“…Since its development in early 2010s, a huge number of experiments and test-cases have been run with P-SBAS by the developers team at CNR-IREA (e.g., [13,19,[54][55][56][57][58][59]), as well as by independent research teams in the GEP Early Adopters Programme (e.g., [23,24,[60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69]), using ERS-1/2, ENVISAT, COSMO-SkyMed, and Sentinel-1 SAR imagery. Not only local and city scale, but also regional (e.g., [13,57,58,65]), national (i.e., Italy; [54,59]), and up to continental (i.e., whole Europe; [22]) scale studies have been successfully carried out.…”

“…Since its development in early 2010s, a huge number of experiments and test-cases have been run with P-SBAS by the developers team at CNR-IREA (e.g., [13,19,[54][55][56][57][58][59]), as well as by independent research teams in the GEP Early Adopters Programme (e.g., [23,24,[60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69]), using ERS-1/2, ENVISAT, COSMO-SkyMed, and Sentinel-1 SAR imagery. Not only local and city scale, but also regional (e.g., [13,57,58,65]), national (i.e., Italy; [54,59]), and up to continental (i.e., whole Europe; [22]) scale studies have been successfully carried out. Moreover, different computing infrastructure setups have been trialed for the data processing, including CNR-IREA's own cluster (e.g., [19,56,57,70]), the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-computing environment (e.g., [13,54,[56][57][58]), ESA's Grid-Processing On Demand (G-POD) (e.g., [55,60,65,68,69,71,72]) and GEP (e.g., …”

“…Not only local and city scale, but also regional (e.g., [13,57,58,65]), national (i.e., Italy; [54,59]), and up to continental (i.e., whole Europe; [22]) scale studies have been successfully carried out. Moreover, different computing infrastructure setups have been trialed for the data processing, including CNR-IREA's own cluster (e.g., [19,56,57,70]), the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-computing environment (e.g., [13,54,[56][57][58]), ESA's Grid-Processing On Demand (G-POD) (e.g., [55,60,65,68,69,71,72]) and GEP (e.g., [24,61,63,64,67]), and more recently the ONDA Data and Information Access Service (DIAS) [22].…”

“…Given the known values of the LOS deformation velocity in the ascending (V A ) and descending (V D ) mode at each location i, the V U and V E were estimated as follows (e.g., [65]):…”

State of the Art and Recent Advancements in the Modelling of Land Subsidence Induced by Groundwater Withdrawal

“…Such techniques can be applied in order to collect time-series of land surface movements over wide areas with millimetre accuracy [25][26][27]. For example, the use of wide-area InSAR survey processed with the Small Baseline Subset (SBAS) and Persistent Scatter (PS) InSAR method made it possible to analyse deformation at geothermal exploitation sites and its relationship with energy production in the area of the eastern Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt [28], and to detect ground millimetric movements in Ravenna and Ferrara, Italy [29]. The substantial improvement in A-DInSAR techniques witnessed over the last few years is primarily linked to the development of advanced computational algorithms [30].…”