Radar Remote Sensing for geohazards: opportunities and challenges in the era of Sentinel-1

InSAR, as a proven tool for displacement measurement, has been used widely in the last two decades for different geohazards applications such as earthquakes, volcanoes, and land subsidence. The primary limiting factor in using InSAR routinely for geohazard monitoring in the past was non-availability of regular SAR datasets in many parts of the world. Since Sentinel-1 satellite was launched in 2014 by Europian Space Agency, it has dramatically changed the availability of data. It acquires SAR data suitable for InSAR applications every 6 or 12 days from every part of the world. The images acquired by Sentinel-1 cover a wide area of 250 km by 250 km. by joining neighboring frames of the data, it is even possible to study larger areas. Thanks to its free data policy, Sentinel-1 products are available freely for any scientific and commercial applications. In this study, we investigate potentials and opportunities provided by Sentinel-1 in geohazard monitoring on a large scale. With more than two years of data acquired by Sentinel-1, we examine surface displacement on a country level with dense InSAR time-series. Furthermore, methods to deal with the extensive data provided by Sentinel-1, large-scale processing of data are discussed.