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Promote the Use of Copernicus Sentinel-1 data and Valorize a Prototype of an on-demand Service for Radar Interferometry Processing

Point of contact
Laura Sedaine
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
3 rue Michel Ange
75016 Paris
Phone: +33-1-44964325


This action aims to facilitate and expand the use of Sentinel-1 data by students and the French research community by providing an on-demand service for radar interferometry processing applied to ground deformation applications.  For this purpose, we propose (1) to strengthen and to scale-up an existing prototype of on-demand service for Sentinel-1 radar processing; (2) to design related tutorial and documentation materials; (3) to generate and to provide examples of Sentinel-1 derived high-level products for different case studies.

Since 2014, radar satellites of the COPERNICUS Sentinel-1 mission provide massive amount of radar data freely available. Worldwide systematic background acquisition strategy and the 6-days revisit time of Sentinel-1 mission offer unprecedented opportunities for a wider use of radar interferometry technique (InSAR) to measure ground deformations related to various processes (e.g. earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, subsidences). However, the user community of Radar imagery remains much less developed than that of optical imagery. This is particularly true for radar interferometry, which still requires a significant amount of processing and expertise to get high-level products that can be interpreted by non-radar expert for Earth sciences applications. Furthermore, the new default mode of acquisition of Sentinel-1 (TOPSAR) and the huge amount of data available in near real-time require new processing schemes, and significant computing and storage facilities often not available to individual researcher or teacher.

In order to facilitate and expand the use of Sentinel-1 data by students and the French research community, we propose to provide an access to an on-demand service for InSAR processing available through a web service. A prototype of such an on-demand service for Sentinel-1 InSAR processing for researchers has been developed by a consortium of French research laboratories of CNRS in partnership with some universities, within the framework of the French national data center ForM@ter and in coordination with the EU EPOS (European Plate Observatory System) project, as part of the GDM service (Ground Deformation Monitoring) proposed in the work package 12 (satellite data). However, in its current stage this on-demand service is implemented as a “demonstrator”, meaning that it has restricted functionalities, and can only be accessible by a limited number of authorized users, for a limited amount of data and products. In order to provide an operational on-demand service for the French communities, we need:

  1. To strengthen our processing and storage capabilities. In practice, it required to have numerous dedicated computing nodes on HPC cluster, and larger storage capacities (about 200 Tera-octed).
  2. To improve the concurrent access by different users and make easy the registration of users to the service. Scaling-up our system and implementing a concurrent access require some technical developments.

Regarding the on-demand service itself, this project will focus on point (2), as we recently had opportunities at the national level to address the point (1).

Another prerequisite to a wider use of the service, is to provide good documentation and training material to users that are not expert in the field. Some work has also to be done on the design of the web interface taking into account user’s feedback. We propose to design tutorials for the web service, and in addition, we will provide a detailed documentation about the back-end of the service in complement to the access to the source code. This aims to mitigate a common flaw in online services that is they can be seen as a black box, which is often frustrating for students and researchers.

Finally, in order to raise awareness and promote the use of InSAR for Earth Sciences, we also propose to process systematically Sentinel-1 data on target areas of geophysical interest for large areas (typically five tiles of 1000x1000 km2). The goal is to show through several case studies the very new potentialities of Sentinel-1 data measurements for tracking small but large-scale geophysical processes (e.g. mountain uplift process, phasing and evolution of permafrost-related deformation, etc.). The products will consist in 3-D cubes with typically 200m spacing and 6-days to 24 days sampling interval. We propose to make available to researchers the processed data cubes, such that they can apply their information retrieval algorithms (data mining, compressed sensing, pattern matching, denoising filters).

Outputs and Results

  • On demand web service for Sentinel-1 InSAR processing available for French academic (students and researchers); the system should be able to deal with concurrent users working on different areas
  • Tutorial and user manual for the web service, and detailed documentation about the NSBAS processing chain running in the back-end
  • High-level data product, that is spatio-temporal processed data “cubes” on five 1000x1000km2 tiles (with data every 6 to 24 days for 6 years), provided to users such that they could then train their algorithms for automatic information retrieval; targets areas will be chosen for demonstrating the new potentialities of Sentinel-1 data for geophysical applications
  • Open access to tutorial, documentation, data products over case studies, and source code