We present the continuous monitoring of ground deformation at regional scale using ESA (European ... more We present the continuous monitoring of ground deformation at regional scale using ESA (European Space Agency) Sentinel-1constellation of satellites. We discuss this operational monitoring service through the case study of the Tuscany Region (Central Italy), selected due to its peculiar geological setting prone to ground instability phenomena. We set up a systematic processing chain of Sentinel-1 acquisitions to create continuously updated ground deformation data to mark the transition from static satellite analysis, based on the analysis of archive images, to dynamic monitoring of ground displacement. Displacement time series, systematically updated with the most recent available Sentinel-1 acquisition, are analysed to identify anomalous points (i.e., points where a change in the dynamic of motion is occurring). The presence of a cluster of persistent anomalies affecting elements at risk determines a significant level of risk, with the necessity of further analysis. Here, we show t...
EAGE Workshop on Geomechanics in the Oil and Gas Industry, 2014
show, with a case study from the InSalah project, Algeria, the benefits of a new application of s... more show, with a case study from the InSalah project, Algeria, the benefits of a new application of surface deformation monitoring using multi-interferogram permanent scatterer techniques, an advance form of radar interferometry.
ABSTRACT Reservoir monitoring improves our understanding of reservoir behavior and helps achieve ... more ABSTRACT Reservoir monitoring improves our understanding of reservoir behavior and helps achieve more effective reservoir management and prediction of future performance with obvious economic benefits. Volumetric changes in reservoirs due to fluid extraction and injection can induce either subsidence or uplift which can trigger fault reactivation and threaten well integrity (as well as reservoir structural integrity). Depending on the depth of the reservoir and the characteristic of the cap rock, deformation may also be detectable at the surface. Surface deformation monitoring can provide valuable constraints on the dynamic behavior of a reservoir enabling the evaluation of volumetric changes in the reservoir through time, allowing the calibration of geo-mechanical models. Whatever the surveying technique, the detection of millimeter level surface deformation is required to monitor small surface displacement rates, which could impact risk evaluation and environmental impact assessment in oil&gas operations, as well as in geothermal plants.
Recently concerns have emerged regarding interferometry with TOPS, since it has been stated that ... more Recently concerns have emerged regarding interferometry with TOPS, since it has been stated that a highly accurate azimuth alignment is needed to avoid phase bias in the interferometric phase. However, one should distinguish between effects due to limited geometric accuracy related to the static scene (e.g., orbit or DEM), and geophysical signals (actual azimuth displacements), which might give rise to legitimate phase jumps at the border between subsequent bursts. This paper addresses this topic and suggests an alternative methodology to process and interpret TOPS interferograms of non-stationary scenarios.
Reservoir monitoring improves our understanding of reservoir behavior and helps achieve more effe... more Reservoir monitoring improves our understanding of reservoir behavior and helps achieve more effective reservoir management and prediction of future performance with obvious economic benefits. Volumetric changes in reservoirs due to fluid extraction and injection can induce either subsidence or uplift which can trigger fault reactivation and threaten well integrity (as well as reservoir structural integrity). Depending on the depth of the reservoir and the characteristic of the cap rock, deformation may also be detectable at the surface. Surface deformation monitoring can provide valuable constraints on the dynamic behavior of a reservoir enabling the evaluation of volumetric changes in the reservoir through time, allowing the calibration of geo-mechanical models. Whatever the surveying technique, the detection of millimeter level surface deformation is required to monitor small surface displacement rates, which could impact risk evaluation and environmental impact assessment in oil...
After a decade since the first results on ERS data, Permanent Scatterer (PS) InSAR has become an ... more After a decade since the first results on ERS data, Permanent Scatterer (PS) InSAR has become an operational technology for detecting and monitoring slow surface deformation phenomena such as subsidence and uplift, landslides, seismic fault creeping, volcanic inflation, etc. Processing procedures have been continuously updated, but the core of the algorithm has not been changed significantly. As well known, in PSInSAR, the main target is the identification of individual pixels that exhibit a ``PS behavior'', i.e. they are only slightly affected by both temporal and geometrical decorrelation. Typically, these scatterers correspond to man-made objects, but PS have been identified also in non-urban areas, where exposed rocks or outcrops can indeed create good radar benchmarks and enable high-quality displacement measurements. Contrary to interferogram stacking techniques, PS analyses are carried out on a pixel-by-pixel basis, with no filtering of the interferograms, in order to...
Apart from the environmental impact of subsidence and uplift phenomena induced by fluid injection... more Apart from the environmental impact of subsidence and uplift phenomena induced by fluid injection and/or extraction, recent reservoir optimization techniques ask for timely information about many geophysical parameters, both downhole and on the surface. In particular, surface deformation measurements are lately gaining increasing attention within the reservoir engineer community, which is searching for new monitoring tools to complement seismic surveys. In the last decade, a new remote-sensing technology called PSInSAR™- based on the use of satellite radar data - is receiving an increasing attention, thanks to its capability to provide accurate, large-scale surface deformation measurements. The main advantages of PSInSAR™ data, compared to conventional geodetic networks, are essentially related to the spatial density of measurement points, the temporal frequency of the observations, the precision and the limited cost, at least for the monitoring of large areas. Since the number of r...
Surface deformation monitoring provides unique data for observing and measuring the performance o... more Surface deformation monitoring provides unique data for observing and measuring the performance of producing hydrocarbon reservoirs, for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) and for Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage (CCS). To this aim, radar interferometry (InSAR) and, in particular, multi-interferogram Permanent Scatterer (PS) techniques are innovative, valuable and cost-effective tools. Depending on reservoir characteristics and depth, oil or gas production can induce surface subsidence or, in the cases of EOR and CCS, ground heave, potentially triggering fault reactivation and in some cases threatening well integrity. Mapping the surface effects of fault reactivation, due to either fluid extraction or injection, usually requires the availability of hundreds of measurement points per square km with millimeter-level precision, which is time consuming and expensive to obtain using traditional monitoring techniques, but can be readily obtained with InSAR data. Moreover, more advanced InSAR t...
Optical leveling campaigns, tiltmeters, GPS and InSAR are geodetic techniques used to detect and ... more Optical leveling campaigns, tiltmeters, GPS and InSAR are geodetic techniques used to detect and monitor surface deformation phenomena. In particular, InSAR data from satellite radar sensors are gaining increasing attention for their cost-effectiveness and unique technical features, making possible the monitoring of large areas, even revisiting the past. Moreover, more advanced InSAR techniques (PSInSAR™, SqueeSAR™) developed in the last decade are capable of providing millimeter precision, comparable to optical leveling, and a high spatial density of displacement measurements, over long periods of time without need of installing equipment or otherwise accessing the study area.
InSAR is a remote sensing tool that has applications in both geothermal exploration and in the ma... more InSAR is a remote sensing tool that has applications in both geothermal exploration and in the management of producing fields. The technique has developed rapidly in recent years and the most evolved algorithms, now capable of providing precise ground movement measurements with unprecedented spatial density over large areas, allow, among other things, the monitoring of the effects of fluid injection and extraction on surface deformation and the detection of active faults.
2008 Second Workshop on Use of Remote Sensing Techniques for Monitoring Volcanoes and Seismogenic Areas, 2008
This presentation focuses on the results of the application of the Permanent Scatterers Technique... more This presentation focuses on the results of the application of the Permanent Scatterers Technique (PSInSAR¿, an advanced InSAR technique capable of measuring millimetre scale displacements of individual radar targets on the ground) as a method for measuring deformation in volcanic area within the Globvolcano project. In this project, T.R.E. takes part as a service provider for the Deformation Mapping products.
EAGE Workshop on Geomechanics in the Oil and Gas Industry, 2014
show, with a case study from the InSalah project, Algeria, the benefits of a new application of s... more show, with a case study from the InSalah project, Algeria, the benefits of a new application of surface deformation monitoring using multi-interferogram permanent scatterer techniques, an advance form of radar interferometry.
Surface deformation monitoring provides unique data for observing and measuring the performance o... more Surface deformation monitoring provides unique data for observing and measuring the performance of producing hydrocarbon reservoirs, for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) and for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). To this end, radar interferometry (InSAR), particularly multi-interferogram Persistent Scatterer (PS) techniques, such as PSInSAR™, are innovative, valuable and cost-effective tools. Depending on reservoir characteristics and depth, oil or gas production can induce surface subsidence or, in the cases of EOR and CCS, ground heave, potentially triggering fault reactivation and in some cases threatening well integrity. Mapping the surface effects of fault reactivation, due to either fluid extraction or injection, usually requires the availability of hundreds of measurement points per square km with millimeter-level precision, which is time consuming and expensive to obtain using traditional monitoring techniques, but can be readily obtained with InSAR data. Moreover, advanced InSAR techniques developed in the last decade are capable of providing millimeter precision, comparable to optical leveling, and a high spatial density of displacement measurements over long periods of time, without the need for installing equipment or otherwise accessing the study area. Until recently, a limitation to the application of InSAR was the relatively long revisiting time (24 or 35 days) of the previous generation of C-band satellites (ERS1-2, Envisat, Radarsat). However, a new generation of X-band radar satellites (TerraSAR-X and the COSMO-SkyMed constellation), which have been operational since 2008, are providing significant improvements. TerraSAR-X has a repeat cycle of 11 days, while the joint use
SEG Technical Program Expanded Abstracts 2011, 2011
It is well established that satellite-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry can pro... more It is well established that satellite-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry can provide accurate and spatially dense surface deformation measurements. In the InSalah project SAR interferometry has proven effective in monitoring surface deformation induced by CO2 injection. Typically, a single SAR geometry provides a projection of the surface displacement vector along the look vector or line-of-sight (LOS). However, in this paper we highlight the utility of combining SAR data from two or more geometries in order to derive a two-component surface displacement field. We also show how the availability of both vertical and East-West displacement components better constrains an inversion for injection-related deformation improving our understanding of reservoir dynamics.
Permanent Scatterer interferometry (PSInSAR) has represented in the last ten years a widely used ... more Permanent Scatterer interferometry (PSInSAR) has represented in the last ten years a widely used and powerful tool for surface deformation monitoring. Yet, it was soon highlighted how the stability constraint required for a target to be considered a PS could become too tight in case of scenarios characterized by the presence of distributed targets, which may easily happen not to be stable over the entire observation period due to geometrical and temporal decorrelation. A viable approach to infer information in a distributed target environment is to exploit the knowledge about target statistics, in particular the data Covariance Matrix. Although the Sample Covariance Matrix is an unbiased and consistent estimator of the true Covariance Matrix, its usage in the applications is limited by the fact that it is often ill-conditioned. Accordingly, in many cases better results are obtained by shrinking the sample covariance matrix towards a more structured model, in such a way as to represent the information by means of a reduced set of parameters.
On 13 January 2012, the Italian vessel, Costa Concordia, wrecked offshore Giglio Island, along th... more On 13 January 2012, the Italian vessel, Costa Concordia, wrecked offshore Giglio Island, along the coast of Tuscany (Italy). The ship partially sunk, lying on the starboard side on a 22° steep rocky seabed, making the stability conditions of the ship critically in danger of sliding, shifting and settling. The tilted position of the ship created also pernicious conditions for the divers involved in the search and rescue operations. It became immediately clear that a continuous monitoring of the position and movements of the ship was of paramount importance to guarantee the security of the people working around and within the wreck. Starting from January 19, the Italian constellation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites, COSMO-SkyMed (CSK), was tasked to acquire high resolution images of the wreck. Thanks to CSK's short response and revisiting time and its capability to acquire high resolution images in Spotlight mode, satellite data were integrated within the real time, ground-based monitoring system implemented to provide the civil protection authorities with a regular update on the ship stability. Exploitation of both the phase (satellite radar interferometry, InSAR) and amplitude (speckle tracking) information from CSK images, taken along the acquisition orbit, Enhanced Spotlight (ES)-29, revealed a general movement of the translation of the vessel, consistent with OPEN ACCESS Remote Sens. 2014, 6 3989 sliding toward the east of the hull on the seabed. A total displacement, with respect to the coastline, of 1666 mm and 345 mm of the bow and stern, respectively, was recorded, over the time period of
IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 2000
Permanent Scatterer SAR Interferometry (PSInSAR) aims to identify coherent radar targets exhibiti... more Permanent Scatterer SAR Interferometry (PSInSAR) aims to identify coherent radar targets exhibiting high phase stability over the entire observation time period. These targets often correspond to point-wise, man-made objects widely available over a city, but less present in non-urban areas. To overcome the limits of PSInSAR, analysis of interferometric data-stacks should aim at extracting geophysical parameters not only from point-wise deterministic objects (i.e., PS), but also from distributed scatterers (DS). Rather than developing hybrid processing chains where two or more algorithms are applied to the same data-stack, and results are then combined, in this paper we introduce a new approach, SqueeSAR, to jointly process PS and DS, taking into account their different statistical behavior. As it will be shown, PS and DS can be jointly processed without the need for significant changes to the traditional PSInSAR processing chain and without the need to unwrap hundreds of interferograms, provided that the coherence matrix associated with each DS is properly "squeezed" to provide a vector of optimum (wrapped) phase values. Results on real SAR data, acquired over an Alpine area, challenging for any InSAR analysis, confirm the effectiveness of this new approach.
We present the continuous monitoring of ground deformation at regional scale using ESA (European ... more We present the continuous monitoring of ground deformation at regional scale using ESA (European Space Agency) Sentinel-1constellation of satellites. We discuss this operational monitoring service through the case study of the Tuscany Region (Central Italy), selected due to its peculiar geological setting prone to ground instability phenomena. We set up a systematic processing chain of Sentinel-1 acquisitions to create continuously updated ground deformation data to mark the transition from static satellite analysis, based on the analysis of archive images, to dynamic monitoring of ground displacement. Displacement time series, systematically updated with the most recent available Sentinel-1 acquisition, are analysed to identify anomalous points (i.e., points where a change in the dynamic of motion is occurring). The presence of a cluster of persistent anomalies affecting elements at risk determines a significant level of risk, with the necessity of further analysis. Here, we show t...
EAGE Workshop on Geomechanics in the Oil and Gas Industry, 2014
show, with a case study from the InSalah project, Algeria, the benefits of a new application of s... more show, with a case study from the InSalah project, Algeria, the benefits of a new application of surface deformation monitoring using multi-interferogram permanent scatterer techniques, an advance form of radar interferometry.
ABSTRACT Reservoir monitoring improves our understanding of reservoir behavior and helps achieve ... more ABSTRACT Reservoir monitoring improves our understanding of reservoir behavior and helps achieve more effective reservoir management and prediction of future performance with obvious economic benefits. Volumetric changes in reservoirs due to fluid extraction and injection can induce either subsidence or uplift which can trigger fault reactivation and threaten well integrity (as well as reservoir structural integrity). Depending on the depth of the reservoir and the characteristic of the cap rock, deformation may also be detectable at the surface. Surface deformation monitoring can provide valuable constraints on the dynamic behavior of a reservoir enabling the evaluation of volumetric changes in the reservoir through time, allowing the calibration of geo-mechanical models. Whatever the surveying technique, the detection of millimeter level surface deformation is required to monitor small surface displacement rates, which could impact risk evaluation and environmental impact assessment in oil&gas operations, as well as in geothermal plants.
Recently concerns have emerged regarding interferometry with TOPS, since it has been stated that ... more Recently concerns have emerged regarding interferometry with TOPS, since it has been stated that a highly accurate azimuth alignment is needed to avoid phase bias in the interferometric phase. However, one should distinguish between effects due to limited geometric accuracy related to the static scene (e.g., orbit or DEM), and geophysical signals (actual azimuth displacements), which might give rise to legitimate phase jumps at the border between subsequent bursts. This paper addresses this topic and suggests an alternative methodology to process and interpret TOPS interferograms of non-stationary scenarios.
Reservoir monitoring improves our understanding of reservoir behavior and helps achieve more effe... more Reservoir monitoring improves our understanding of reservoir behavior and helps achieve more effective reservoir management and prediction of future performance with obvious economic benefits. Volumetric changes in reservoirs due to fluid extraction and injection can induce either subsidence or uplift which can trigger fault reactivation and threaten well integrity (as well as reservoir structural integrity). Depending on the depth of the reservoir and the characteristic of the cap rock, deformation may also be detectable at the surface. Surface deformation monitoring can provide valuable constraints on the dynamic behavior of a reservoir enabling the evaluation of volumetric changes in the reservoir through time, allowing the calibration of geo-mechanical models. Whatever the surveying technique, the detection of millimeter level surface deformation is required to monitor small surface displacement rates, which could impact risk evaluation and environmental impact assessment in oil...
After a decade since the first results on ERS data, Permanent Scatterer (PS) InSAR has become an ... more After a decade since the first results on ERS data, Permanent Scatterer (PS) InSAR has become an operational technology for detecting and monitoring slow surface deformation phenomena such as subsidence and uplift, landslides, seismic fault creeping, volcanic inflation, etc. Processing procedures have been continuously updated, but the core of the algorithm has not been changed significantly. As well known, in PSInSAR, the main target is the identification of individual pixels that exhibit a ``PS behavior'', i.e. they are only slightly affected by both temporal and geometrical decorrelation. Typically, these scatterers correspond to man-made objects, but PS have been identified also in non-urban areas, where exposed rocks or outcrops can indeed create good radar benchmarks and enable high-quality displacement measurements. Contrary to interferogram stacking techniques, PS analyses are carried out on a pixel-by-pixel basis, with no filtering of the interferograms, in order to...
Apart from the environmental impact of subsidence and uplift phenomena induced by fluid injection... more Apart from the environmental impact of subsidence and uplift phenomena induced by fluid injection and/or extraction, recent reservoir optimization techniques ask for timely information about many geophysical parameters, both downhole and on the surface. In particular, surface deformation measurements are lately gaining increasing attention within the reservoir engineer community, which is searching for new monitoring tools to complement seismic surveys. In the last decade, a new remote-sensing technology called PSInSAR™- based on the use of satellite radar data - is receiving an increasing attention, thanks to its capability to provide accurate, large-scale surface deformation measurements. The main advantages of PSInSAR™ data, compared to conventional geodetic networks, are essentially related to the spatial density of measurement points, the temporal frequency of the observations, the precision and the limited cost, at least for the monitoring of large areas. Since the number of r...
Surface deformation monitoring provides unique data for observing and measuring the performance o... more Surface deformation monitoring provides unique data for observing and measuring the performance of producing hydrocarbon reservoirs, for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) and for Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage (CCS). To this aim, radar interferometry (InSAR) and, in particular, multi-interferogram Permanent Scatterer (PS) techniques are innovative, valuable and cost-effective tools. Depending on reservoir characteristics and depth, oil or gas production can induce surface subsidence or, in the cases of EOR and CCS, ground heave, potentially triggering fault reactivation and in some cases threatening well integrity. Mapping the surface effects of fault reactivation, due to either fluid extraction or injection, usually requires the availability of hundreds of measurement points per square km with millimeter-level precision, which is time consuming and expensive to obtain using traditional monitoring techniques, but can be readily obtained with InSAR data. Moreover, more advanced InSAR t...
Optical leveling campaigns, tiltmeters, GPS and InSAR are geodetic techniques used to detect and ... more Optical leveling campaigns, tiltmeters, GPS and InSAR are geodetic techniques used to detect and monitor surface deformation phenomena. In particular, InSAR data from satellite radar sensors are gaining increasing attention for their cost-effectiveness and unique technical features, making possible the monitoring of large areas, even revisiting the past. Moreover, more advanced InSAR techniques (PSInSAR™, SqueeSAR™) developed in the last decade are capable of providing millimeter precision, comparable to optical leveling, and a high spatial density of displacement measurements, over long periods of time without need of installing equipment or otherwise accessing the study area.
InSAR is a remote sensing tool that has applications in both geothermal exploration and in the ma... more InSAR is a remote sensing tool that has applications in both geothermal exploration and in the management of producing fields. The technique has developed rapidly in recent years and the most evolved algorithms, now capable of providing precise ground movement measurements with unprecedented spatial density over large areas, allow, among other things, the monitoring of the effects of fluid injection and extraction on surface deformation and the detection of active faults.
2008 Second Workshop on Use of Remote Sensing Techniques for Monitoring Volcanoes and Seismogenic Areas, 2008
This presentation focuses on the results of the application of the Permanent Scatterers Technique... more This presentation focuses on the results of the application of the Permanent Scatterers Technique (PSInSAR¿, an advanced InSAR technique capable of measuring millimetre scale displacements of individual radar targets on the ground) as a method for measuring deformation in volcanic area within the Globvolcano project. In this project, T.R.E. takes part as a service provider for the Deformation Mapping products.
EAGE Workshop on Geomechanics in the Oil and Gas Industry, 2014
show, with a case study from the InSalah project, Algeria, the benefits of a new application of s... more show, with a case study from the InSalah project, Algeria, the benefits of a new application of surface deformation monitoring using multi-interferogram permanent scatterer techniques, an advance form of radar interferometry.
Surface deformation monitoring provides unique data for observing and measuring the performance o... more Surface deformation monitoring provides unique data for observing and measuring the performance of producing hydrocarbon reservoirs, for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) and for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). To this end, radar interferometry (InSAR), particularly multi-interferogram Persistent Scatterer (PS) techniques, such as PSInSAR™, are innovative, valuable and cost-effective tools. Depending on reservoir characteristics and depth, oil or gas production can induce surface subsidence or, in the cases of EOR and CCS, ground heave, potentially triggering fault reactivation and in some cases threatening well integrity. Mapping the surface effects of fault reactivation, due to either fluid extraction or injection, usually requires the availability of hundreds of measurement points per square km with millimeter-level precision, which is time consuming and expensive to obtain using traditional monitoring techniques, but can be readily obtained with InSAR data. Moreover, advanced InSAR techniques developed in the last decade are capable of providing millimeter precision, comparable to optical leveling, and a high spatial density of displacement measurements over long periods of time, without the need for installing equipment or otherwise accessing the study area. Until recently, a limitation to the application of InSAR was the relatively long revisiting time (24 or 35 days) of the previous generation of C-band satellites (ERS1-2, Envisat, Radarsat). However, a new generation of X-band radar satellites (TerraSAR-X and the COSMO-SkyMed constellation), which have been operational since 2008, are providing significant improvements. TerraSAR-X has a repeat cycle of 11 days, while the joint use
SEG Technical Program Expanded Abstracts 2011, 2011
It is well established that satellite-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry can pro... more It is well established that satellite-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry can provide accurate and spatially dense surface deformation measurements. In the InSalah project SAR interferometry has proven effective in monitoring surface deformation induced by CO2 injection. Typically, a single SAR geometry provides a projection of the surface displacement vector along the look vector or line-of-sight (LOS). However, in this paper we highlight the utility of combining SAR data from two or more geometries in order to derive a two-component surface displacement field. We also show how the availability of both vertical and East-West displacement components better constrains an inversion for injection-related deformation improving our understanding of reservoir dynamics.
Permanent Scatterer interferometry (PSInSAR) has represented in the last ten years a widely used ... more Permanent Scatterer interferometry (PSInSAR) has represented in the last ten years a widely used and powerful tool for surface deformation monitoring. Yet, it was soon highlighted how the stability constraint required for a target to be considered a PS could become too tight in case of scenarios characterized by the presence of distributed targets, which may easily happen not to be stable over the entire observation period due to geometrical and temporal decorrelation. A viable approach to infer information in a distributed target environment is to exploit the knowledge about target statistics, in particular the data Covariance Matrix. Although the Sample Covariance Matrix is an unbiased and consistent estimator of the true Covariance Matrix, its usage in the applications is limited by the fact that it is often ill-conditioned. Accordingly, in many cases better results are obtained by shrinking the sample covariance matrix towards a more structured model, in such a way as to represent the information by means of a reduced set of parameters.
On 13 January 2012, the Italian vessel, Costa Concordia, wrecked offshore Giglio Island, along th... more On 13 January 2012, the Italian vessel, Costa Concordia, wrecked offshore Giglio Island, along the coast of Tuscany (Italy). The ship partially sunk, lying on the starboard side on a 22° steep rocky seabed, making the stability conditions of the ship critically in danger of sliding, shifting and settling. The tilted position of the ship created also pernicious conditions for the divers involved in the search and rescue operations. It became immediately clear that a continuous monitoring of the position and movements of the ship was of paramount importance to guarantee the security of the people working around and within the wreck. Starting from January 19, the Italian constellation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites, COSMO-SkyMed (CSK), was tasked to acquire high resolution images of the wreck. Thanks to CSK's short response and revisiting time and its capability to acquire high resolution images in Spotlight mode, satellite data were integrated within the real time, ground-based monitoring system implemented to provide the civil protection authorities with a regular update on the ship stability. Exploitation of both the phase (satellite radar interferometry, InSAR) and amplitude (speckle tracking) information from CSK images, taken along the acquisition orbit, Enhanced Spotlight (ES)-29, revealed a general movement of the translation of the vessel, consistent with OPEN ACCESS Remote Sens. 2014, 6 3989 sliding toward the east of the hull on the seabed. A total displacement, with respect to the coastline, of 1666 mm and 345 mm of the bow and stern, respectively, was recorded, over the time period of
IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 2000
Permanent Scatterer SAR Interferometry (PSInSAR) aims to identify coherent radar targets exhibiti... more Permanent Scatterer SAR Interferometry (PSInSAR) aims to identify coherent radar targets exhibiting high phase stability over the entire observation time period. These targets often correspond to point-wise, man-made objects widely available over a city, but less present in non-urban areas. To overcome the limits of PSInSAR, analysis of interferometric data-stacks should aim at extracting geophysical parameters not only from point-wise deterministic objects (i.e., PS), but also from distributed scatterers (DS). Rather than developing hybrid processing chains where two or more algorithms are applied to the same data-stack, and results are then combined, in this paper we introduce a new approach, SqueeSAR, to jointly process PS and DS, taking into account their different statistical behavior. As it will be shown, PS and DS can be jointly processed without the need for significant changes to the traditional PSInSAR processing chain and without the need to unwrap hundreds of interferograms, provided that the coherence matrix associated with each DS is properly "squeezed" to provide a vector of optimum (wrapped) phase values. Results on real SAR data, acquired over an Alpine area, challenging for any InSAR analysis, confirm the effectiveness of this new approach.
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Papers by Alessio Rucci