A Cloud-Based System for Automatic Hazard Monitoring from Sentinel-1 SAR Data
Abstract
Despite the all-weather capabilities of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and its high performance in change detection, the application of SAR for operational hazard monitoring was limited in the past. This has largely been due to high data costs, slow product delivery, and limited temporal sampling associated with legacy SAR systems. Only since the launch of ESA's Sentinel-1 sensors have routinely acquired and free-of-charge SAR data become available, allowing—for the first time—for a meaningful contribution of SAR to disaster monitoring. In this paper, we present recent technical advances of the Sentinel-1-based SAR processing system SARVIEWS, which was originally built to generate hazard products for volcano monitoring centers. We outline the main functionalities of SARVIEWS including its automatic database interface to Sentinel-1 holdings of the Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF), and its set of automatic processing techniques. Subsequently, we present recent system improvements that were added to SARVIEWS and allowed for a vast expansion of its hazard services; specifically: (1) In early 2017, the SARVIEWS system was migrated into the Amazon Cloud, providing access to cloud capabilities such as elastic scaling of compute resources and cloud-based storage; (2) we co-located SARVIEWS with ASF's cloud-based Sentinel-1 archive, enabling the efficient and cost effective processing of large data volumes; (3) we integrated SARVIEWS with ASF's HyP3 system (http://hyp3.asf.alaska.edu/), providing functionality such as subscription creation via API or map interface as well as automatic email notification; (4) we automated the production chains for seismic and volcanic hazards by integrating SARVIEWS with the USGS earthquake notification service (ENS) and the USGS eruption alert system. Email notifications from both services are parsed and subscriptions are automatically created when certain event criteria are met; (5) finally, SARVIEWS-generated hazard products are now being made available to the public via the SARVIEWS hazard portal. These improvements have led to the expansion of SARVIEWS toward a broader set of hazard situations, now including volcanoes, earthquakes, and severe weather. We provide details on newly developed techniques and show examples of disasters for which SARVIEWS was invoked.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFM.G33A..03M
- Keywords:
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- 1240 Satellite geodesy: results;
- GEODESY AND GRAVITY;
- 1241 Satellite geodesy: technical issues;
- GEODESY AND GRAVITY;
- 1294 Instruments and techniques;
- GEODESY AND GRAVITY;
- 1295 Integrations of techniques;
- GEODESY AND GRAVITY