European Ground Motion Service (EGMS): General Description, Product Quality, and Examples

Kurzfassung

The European Ground Motion Service (EGMS), funded by the European Commission as an essential element of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS), constitutes the first application of the interferometric SAR (InSAR) technology to high-resolution monitoring of ground deformations over an entire continent, based on full-resolution processing of all Sentinel-1 (S1) satellite acquisitions over most of Europe (Copernicus Participating States). The first release of EGMS products is scheduled for the first quarter of 2022, with annual updates to follow. Upscaling from existing national precursor services to pan-European scale is challenging. EGMS employs the most advanced persistent scatterer (PS) and distributed scatterer (DS) InSAR processing algorithms, and adequate techniques to ensure seamless harmonization between the Sentinel-1 tracks. Moreover, within EGMS, a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) high-quality 50 km grid model is realized, in order to tie the InSAR products to the geodetic reference frame ETRF2014. The millimeter-scale precision measurements of ground motions performed by EGMS map and monitor landslides, subsidence and earthquake or volcanic phenomena all over Europe, and will enables, for example, monitoring of the stability of slopes, mining areas, buildings and infrastructures. The new European geospatial dataset provided by EGMS will enable and hopefully stimulate the development of other products/services based on InSAR measurements for the analysis and monitoring of ground motions and stability of structures, as well as other InSAR products with higher spatial and/or temporal resolution. To foster as wide usage as possible, EGMS foresees tools for visualization, exploration, analysis and download of the ground deformation products, as well as elements to promote best practice applications and user uptake. This presentation will describe all the qualifying points of EGMS. Particular attention will be paid to the characteristics and the accuracy of the realized products, ensured in such a huge production by advanced algorithms and quality checks. In addition, many examples of EGMS products will be shown to discuss the great potential and the (few) limitations of EGMS for mapping and monitoring landslides, subsidence and earthquake or volcanic phenomena, and the related stability of slopes, buildings and infrastructures.