Hazards/Risk

WInSAR is a consortium of non-commercial scientists at 182 institutions engaged in radar remote sensing research and education, with major emphasis on interferometric synthetic aperture (InSAR) studies in the western part of North America. WInSAR is hosted by UNAVCO, Inc. and both organizations are non-profit, membership-governed groups funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the U.S. Geological Survey. To help maximize the scientific return of radar data, WInSAR provides password-protected data access with partners including the Geohazard Supersite and Natural Laboratories initiative of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), the Alaska Satellite Facility, and the various space agencies. Data access follows the regulations from the space agency that created the data, and so there are different amounts of data available to different approved investigators and depending on the country of origin of the WInSAR member. All members have access to the Caltech/JPL/Stanford open source software called ISCE (InSAR Scientific Computing Environment), and even non-members can attend the short courses hosted by UNAVCO. 

We present here a summary of recent results by WInSAR scientists that are based largely or in part on Sentinel, Envisat, and ERS-1/-2 SAR data analysis, with additional SAR data from other satellites and the NASA airborne InSAR system called UAVSAR. Studies have addressed deformation related to the earthquake and volcano cycles, landslides, subsidence due to groundwater withdrawal and subsurface energy production (including hydrocarbons and geothermal), glaciers, and wetland dynamics in a number of locations. These studies include assessment, forecasting, and response to geohazards as well as fundamental research about Earth processes.

Bandung is the capital of the West Java province of Indonesia. The larger metropolitan area of Bandung has a population of more than 8 million people, and a strong exposure to a variety of geohazards. The city is built on a plain, 30km in diameter and surrounded by a mountain range of 2000m peaks. Floods are common in the lowest part of the plain just south of the city center. Landslides frequently occur on the mountain slopes. Five active volcanoes are within a 30-km radius. Earthquakes, although infrequent, are caused by nearby crustal faults and pose increasing concerns. The risk is exacerbated due to climate change, fast urban development and land subsidence at an average rate of -8 cm per year. The RASOR project has selected Bandung as a demonstration case study area for multi-hazard and multi-risk assessment.

Flooding is common in the Bandung basin during the wet season, with rainfall at rates of 100mm/day. The water flows down the slopes and accumulates in the deepest parts of the basin. Over the last decade, the flood hazard has increased as a result of soil sealing, deforestation and land subsidence. The subsidence is induced by aquifer over-exploitation, especially in the western sub-basin, where many industrial plants are located, each extracting large amounts of groundwater from the deep aquifer (deeper than 150m). During the last thirty years, the groundwater levels dropped up to 100 m in this area, and are still declining. Subsidence rates of up to 16 cm/year have been recorded in the last several years.

Satellite SAR data provide information on ground deformation, needed to monitor and model the various sources of these hazards and to perform multi-hazard risk analysis. Here we report on the use of InSAR data from various satellites to provide crucial information for multihazard assessment.  We used InSAR multitemporal analysis of ALOS-1 and COSMO-SkyMed imagery from 2007 to present, to accurately map the urban subsidence. We also used TanDEM-X 12m resolution elevation maps as a basis for rainfall runoff and surface flow modeling. Subsidence rates were projected into the future (2020, 2050 and 2100) to assess the impact of land subsidence on flood hazard for a number of rainfall scenarios. Results show that the flood hazard is increasing in specific areas, which is valuable information for spatial planning.

Rapid climate change has brought changing weather patterns, making risks increasingly challenging to predict and modifying the ways in which hazards interact with each other. Sudden increases in population and rapid urbanization are changing exposure to risk around the globe, making impacts harder to predict. Over the recent decades, there has been a dramatic rise in disasters and their impact on human populations. In 2010, disasters left over 300,000 people dead, affected another 220 million and caused over $US120 billion in economic damages [1]. Despite the availability of operational mapping products, there is up to now no single tool to integrate diverse data and products across hazards, update exposure data quickly and make scenario-based predictions to support both short and long-term risk-related decisions.

The Rapid Analysis and Spatialisation Of Risk (RASOR) project has developed a platform to perform multi-hazard risk analysis to support the full cycle of disaster management, including targeted support to critical infrastructure monitoring and climate change impact assessment. The tool uses the 12m resolution TanDEM-X Digital Elevation Model (DEM) for risk management applications. The DEM serves as a base layer, and is combined with other exposure, hazard and vulnerability data sets to develop specific disaster scenarios. RASOR overlays moreover archived and near-real time very-high resolution optical and radar satellite data, combined with in-situ data for both global and local applications.

RASOR uses a scenario-driven query system to allow users to simulate future scenarios based on existing and assumed conditions, to compare with historical scenarios, and to model multi-hazard risk both before and during an event. Managers can, for example, determine the extent of flooding in a given area, examine up-to-date exposure of people and assets and determine possible scenarios of damage based on changing key parameters. In many cases, users can access a library of historical events to compare possible future events to those of recent history. RASOR allows managers to use these real scenarios when determining new mitigation or prevention measures, and integrate new, real-time data into their operational systems during response activities.

RASOR began as an FP7 EC funded project. The RASOR Consortium has however grown to include new partners and has developed an operations plan to maintain the platform and support new users, creating a freely accessible, sustainable DRM platform for the international disaster community. In May 2016, in Istanbul, RASOR will launch the RASOR Global Community of Practice, a global grouping of interested users who share data and best practices to support informed risk decision-making. RASOR is available with full functionality over five case study areas located in Haiti, Western Java, Rotterdam, Northern Italy and Santorini. Further activities to extend RASOR have begun in Malawi, and several new case study areas will be announced soon. The global tool is available now (May 2016) for upload of user data sets and user-led risk assessment activities. The RASOR Consortium is an open partnership of concerned organizations, working together to improve risk management through an open source risk assessment tool, and will offer global services to support in-depth risk assessment and full-cycle risk management.

[1] http://www.emdat.be/disaster-profiles.

The 25 April 2015 M 7.8 Gorkha earthquake caused more than 8000 fatalities and widespread building damage in central Nepal. The Italian Space Agency’s COSMO–SkyMed Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite acquired data over Kathmandu area four days after the earthquake and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 SAR satellite for larger area nine days after the mainshock. We used these radar observations and rapidly produced damage proxy maps (DPMs) derived from temporal changes in Interferometric SAR coherence. Our DPMs were qualitatively validated through comparison with independent damage analyses by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research’s United Nations Operational Satellite Applications Programme, and based on our own visual inspection of DigitalGlobe’s WorldView optical pre- versus post-event imagery. Our maps were quickly released to responding agencies and the public, and used for damage assessment, determining inspection/imaging priorities, and reconnaissance fieldwork.

Our ability to monitor the Earth is rapidly evolving through development of new sensor technology, both on- and below-ground and from outer space; we are able to deliver this information with increasing rapidity, integrate it, provide solutions to geological understand and furnish essential information for decision makers.

The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) aims at creating a Pan-European infrastructure for solid Earth science to support a safe and sustainable society. In accordance with this vision, the EPOS mission is to integrate the different and advanced European Research Infrastructures for solid Earth Science relying on new e-science opportunities to monitor and unravel the dynamic and complex Earth System. EPOS will enable innovative multidisciplinary research for a better understanding of the Earth’s physical and chemical processes that control earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, ground instability and tsunami as well as the processes driving tectonics and Earth’s surface dynamics. Through integration of data, models and facilities EPOS will allow the Earth Science community to make a step change in developing new concepts and tools for key answers to scientific and socio-economic questions concerning geo-hazards and geo-resources as well as Earth sciences applications to the environment and to the human welfare.

Since its conception, EPOS has been built as “a single, Pan-European, sustainable and distributed infrastructure” and is unique in its architecture and disciplinary coverage: EPOS aims at providing a single infrastructure covering the whole geoscience domain, and connects ten classes of geo-infrastructures which have until now been handled separately, enabling an unprecedented level of scientific integration.

In this framework, the Thematic Core Service (TCS) referred to as Satellite Data is devoted to implement Earth Observation services transversal with respect to the large EPOS community and suitable to be used in several application scenarios. In particular, the main goal is to contribute with mature services that have already well demonstrated their effectiveness and relevance in investigating the physical processes controlling earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and unrest episodes as well as those driving tectonics and Earth surface dynamics. The TCS Satellite Data will provide state-of-art satellite services & products characterized by consolidated and mature procedures, advanced techniques and methods for generating and delivering EO products useful to different users and applicable to several geographical environments and settings.

The EPOS TCS Satellite Data will be developed in strongly cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA) that is building an ecosystem of Thematic Exploitation Platforms (TEP) focused on the capitalization of Ground Segment capabilities and ICT technologies to maximize the exploitation of EO data from past and future missions. These projects intend to develop an innovative operations concept, complementary to the current ESA Earth Observation Payload Data Ground Segment (PDGS). In particular, a TEP refers to a computing platform that follows a given set of scenarios for users, data and ICT provisioning, aggregated around an Earth Science thematic area. The TEP defines three canonical user scenarios covering the EO data exploitation (users discovers and manipulates data), new EO service development (users deploy a new processor) and new EO product development (users publish new results).

Among the TEPs, it is already started the implementation of the Geohazards Exploitation Platform (GEP), which focuses on exploiting satellite EO for geohazard risk assessment. In particular, the GEP is specialized on the exploitation of Earth Observation in the context of the Geohazard Supersites & Natural Laboratories and CEOS Seismic Hazards and Volcanoes Pilots.

The objective of this work is the discussion of the on-going efforts for establishing a synergic collaboration between EPOS and GEP, in order to foster the access, exploitation and integration of advanced EO products and services within the geoscientist community to improve the study and comprehension of earthquakes, volcanoes, surface dynamics and tectonics.