A deep analysis of the Siles dam (Jaén, Spain) area with Sentinel-1 data

Sentinel-1 was the first Earth Observation satellite of the Copernicus program launched in 2014. Thanks to its advanced C-band radar payload, it is capable of offering SAR images with a great coverage (300x300 Km) at a non-square resolution of 5x20 m. The mission is designed to have a great revisiting time, recently improved up to 6 days thanks to the twin sensor Sentinel-1b launched in April 2016. All these characteristics make of this sensor a very powerful data source for continuous monitoring over large areas worldwide and for different geological applications. However, it is still pending of demonstration what could be the contribution of this mission for the monitoring of small and isolated critical infrastructures, typically performed with high resolution and X-band data.This presentation aims to present and discuss first results in Spain achieved on the application of this mission for the monitoring and survey of relatively small and isolated hydrological critical infrastructures like a dam and surroundings. In this work we present the performance on the measurements of deformations over the Siles dam in Jaén, South of Spain, considering the resolution of the sensor, the revisiting time, the surrounding topography and most important the orientation of the dam.It is done through the PSI processing of this very large stack of data performed by using the Subsidence software, based in the Coherent Pixels Technique (CPT) algorithm, which allows us to derive very dense time series for correlation analysis of deformation trends during the filling process in the reservoir.