InSAR Deformation Monitoring Services

We provide satellite InSAR ground deformation monitoring across the sectors where ground movement carries the most risk - mining, land subsidence and groundwater, landslides and slope stability, and oil and gas. Every service measures movement to a scale of millimetres across whole sites and regions, reaches ground that field instruments cannot, and builds a multi-year record of how the surface has behaved.

InSAR - interferometric synthetic aperture radar - measures how far the ground moves along the satellite line of sight between radar passes. A single scene returns not a handful of survey stations but tens of thousands to millions of measurement points across a site or region, each with its own record of movement. Where the ground is measured from two viewing geometries, or alongside GNSS, we separate vertical settlement and uplift from horizontal motion. For every point we report both the current rate of movement, in millimetres per year, and the full history of how it has moved.

Two families of processing cover different ground. Persistent-scatterer analysis tracks stable, radar-bright reflectors such as rock outcrops, buildings, and infrastructure. Distributed-scatterer and small-baseline analysis - including our own multidimensional MSBAS time-series method - recovers movement over rural, vegetated, and natural terrain where those bright reflectors are sparse. Because this approach needs the ground to stay coherent only between nearby acquisitions rather than across the entire monitoring period, it maps movement over vegetated and rapidly changing terrain that persistent-scatterer-only methods leave blank. Choosing the right approach for the setting is what makes measurements reliable over farmland, forest, and open country, not only over cities.

We monitor open-pit slope and wall stability, surface subsidence over active and legacy underground workings, and movement of tailings storage facilities - across an entire operation and through a multi-year history. Wide-area satellite coverage complements on-site instrumentation and supports deformation surveillance under the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management. See mining ground deformation monitoring.

We map regional land subsidence from groundwater extraction and aquifer depletion - the single largest cause of subsidence worldwide - as well as natural settlement of soft and organic soils and sinkholes in karst terrain. These signals span whole basins and municipalities, far larger than any ground survey can cover. See land subsidence and groundwater monitoring.

We detect slow-moving and deep-seated landslides and unstable natural slopes, screen transport and pipeline corridors kilometre by kilometre, and support regional hazard mapping. Because most landslides creep for months or years before they accelerate, satellite InSAR can flag movement long before it is visible on the ground. See landslide monitoring and slope stability analysis.

We track the surface response to production and injection, monitor underground gas storage and salt-cavern integrity, and screen pipeline and facility ground movement. Injection and enhanced recovery can lift the surface; production can lower it - and mapping both across a field helps relate ground movement to operations. See oil and gas ground deformation monitoring.

We monitor embankment, foundation, and impoundment movement at tailings storage facilities - active, inactive, and closed - across a whole portfolio from one consistent source. Satellite coverage extends deformation surveillance to facilities that have no instruments and supports GISTM reporting. See tailings dam monitoring.

We monitor settlement and ground movement along railways, highways, and pipelines, around bridges, tunnels, dams, and levees, and across urban ground affected by tunnelling and excavation - whole corridors in one program, with no site access or traffic disruption. See infrastructure deformation monitoring.

We work across the major civilian SAR constellations and match the radar band to the target. C-band from Europe's Sentinel-1 - freely available, with a six- to twelve-day repeat - is the workhorse for wide-area monitoring. X-band from Germany's TerraSAR-X and Italy's COSMO-SkyMed resolves fine detail on individual structures and small features. L-band from Japan's ALOS-2, with its longer wavelength, holds coherence over vegetation and across longer intervals, which is decisive over forest and northern terrain. For back-analysis, the European ERS and Envisat archives extend the record into the 1990s and 2000s, so a site can often be assessed years before any monitoring was commissioned.

A typical program delivers an average-velocity map of the whole area of interest; a displacement time series for every measurement point, showing how movement has evolved; where geometry allows, a decomposition into vertical and horizontal components; and an interpretive report that sets the measurements in engineering and operational context. Results can be provided as GIS layers for integration with existing asset and hazard systems, and can be updated on a schedule as new radar acquisitions arrive.

Across every sector our approach is the same: wide-area satellite coverage with no instruments on the ground, a multi-year archive that shows how a site has moved in the past as well as the present, and an independent, repeatable record suited to engineering review and regulatory reporting. Our processing is grounded in methods we have developed and published in international remote-sensing journals, including the MSBAS multidimensional time-series method. The same approach has been applied at national scale to build wide-area deformation mosaics from large Sentinel-1 archives, and it reports a per-point standard error alongside every rate, so the reliability of each measurement is explicit. Where it adds value we integrate GNSS to recover the longest-wavelength signals, validate against field data, and provide reporting support on request.

What precision does satellite InSAR achieve?

Line-of-sight movement is measured to a scale of millimetres per year. Independent studies that compare InSAR against GNSS and levelling report agreement to a fraction of a millimetre per year on average, which is why InSAR is trusted for engineering and regulatory monitoring.

How large an area can be monitored?

From a single structure or slope to whole mining operations, basins, corridors, and regions. Wide-area coverage from one consistent dataset is InSAR's core advantage over point-by-point ground surveys.

How is InSAR different from GPS or GNSS monitoring?

GNSS gives absolute movement at a few fixed stations; InSAR gives movement at thousands to millions of points across the whole scene. They are complementary, and we combine them where the highest accuracy or an absolute reference is needed.

Can you show how the ground moved in the past, not just now?

Yes. The multi-year satellite archive - and, through the European ERS and Envisat missions, a record reaching into the 1990s - lets us reconstruct past movement and establish a baseline before monitoring began.

Do you need access to the site?

No. Measurements are made from satellite, so no ground instruments or site access are required. This is what makes remote, extensive, and inaccessible ground practical to monitor.