The LiCSAR automated InSAR data processing system: Latest Developments and Future Prospects

Looking Into the Continents from Space with Synthetic Aperture Radar (LiCSAR) is a system built for large-scale interferometric processing of Sentinel-1 data. LiCSAR automatically produces geocoded wrapped and unwrapped interferograms combining every acquisition epoch with four preceding epochs, and complementary data (coherence, amplitude, line-of-sight unit vectors, digital elevation model, metadata, and atmospheric phase screen estimates by the Generic Atmospheric Correction Online Service, GACOS).

The LiCSAR products are generated in frame units where a standard frame covers ~220x250 km, at 0.001° resolution (WGS-84 coordinate system). Frames are continuously updated for tectonic and volcanic priority areas. As of July 2020, the LiCSAR system covers about 1,500 global frames in which we have processed over 89,000 Sentinel-1 acquisitions and generated over 300,000 interferograms. Among these, 470 frames cover 1,024 global volcanoes. We aim to cover the global seismic mask defined by the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS), but focus initially on the Alpine-Himalayan belt and East African Rift. We serve the products as open and freely accessible through our web portal: https://comet.nerc.ac.uk/comet-lics-portal and aim to provide them to external organisations including the European Plate Observing System (EPOS). We also generate rapid response coseismic interferograms for earthquakes with moment magnitude ( M w )> 5.5 a few hours after the postseismic data become available, and we update frames covering active volcanoes twice per day.