This grant supports acquisition of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery from a foreign space agencies and to support their integration into the existing WinSAR imagery archive maintained at the UNAVCO Facility. The U.S. does not have a civilian SAR sensor in orbit and future plans for a mission are as of yet very uncertain. The WiNSAR archive is available to the geosciences community without additional cost for use in SAR interferometery investigations of spatially continuous crustal deformation processes and dynamics as well as seismic and volcanic hazards mitigation research. Support will allow for purchase of legacy and newly acquired SAR imagery from the European Space Agency (ESA), both from the Envisat and ERS satellite SAR sensors, support tasking costs of the Envisat satellite in order to acquire SAR imagery over specified areas of geological interest which otherwise would not be imaged, and modest investment in mass storage and related data base administration needs.
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This proposal funded the UNAVCO SAR Archive and WInSAR consortium that enables access to satellite radar imagery from foreign space agencies in order to study ground deformation within North America resulting in more than 50 publications in the last four years. The ground deformation observations have been used to better understand earthquake and volcanic hazards, landslides, glacier changes, and human-caused deformation (related to geothermal and hydrocarbon production, mine subsidence and groundwater) in many states including: California, Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Oregon. Several studies used data from WInSAR to develop new methods to exploit the data, which can be applied world-wide. Specifically, this award enabled an extensive hardware, software, database and web site upgrade in early 2012, and software development to enhance UNAVCO SAR archive support. Foundational enhancements and updates included the following: provide an Application Programming Interface to facilitate user search and improve download speed provide a scriptable client to the API reduce the complexity for accessing data by providing a unified search across the WInSAR, EarthScope, and Supersites collections allow the user to identify scenes to be ordered in the same interface that they see scenes already in the UNAVCO SAR and Supersites collections improve the search speed provide for polygon-based spatial search provide a single login to access collections available to user convert data in STF format to CEOS cut swath data into frames provide for TerraSAR-X data to be incorporated in collections limiting access to selected users redesign the web site to simplify user access to WInSAR Consortium information and SAR data Currently, membership in the WInSAR organization stands at 147, including 96 Full members (US institutions), 10 Adjunct I members (North American institutions outside of the US), and 40 Adjunct II Members (outside North America). There are 327 WInSAR data users. Currently 56 WInSAR member institutions have applied for access to the ISCE software package, enabling access to the software for 160 WInSAR authorized users. Over the course of the award period (2011-2014), UNAVCO and WInSAR have supported six short courses (www.unavco.org/education/advancing-geodetic-skills/short-courses/short-courses.html) focused on hands-on training in InSAR data access, processing using the open-source software ROI_PAC, GMTSAR, ISCE, and GIAnT, and analysis. Each course typically supports approximately 25 participants on site, but in 2014, for the ISCE shortcourse, the capability for remote participation was enabled through webex and 19 additional people participated. Thus, in total, about 170 people have been trained. Videos from the ROI_PAC course in 2011 and the ISCE course in 2014 are available at the website.
