Getting ready for the generation of a nationwide ground motion product for great Britain using SAR data stacks: Feasibility, data volumes and perspectives

This work discusses the feasibility of monitoring ground stability and motion across the entire British landmass using satellite InSAR techniques. ERS-1/2 and ENVISAT archive data availability, topographic visibility and land cover constraints for multi-temporal InSAR techniques to succeed across Britain are analysed. Data volumes, hardware and software requirements for the generation of a nationwide InSAR product are discussed, with a view to both novel processing methods to extend InSAR across unfavourable land covers, and parallel and cloud computing systems to decrease InSAR processing time demands. The P-SBAS method implemented onto ESA´s G-POD platform is tested for London and Newcastle using ERS-1/2 1992-2000 and ENVISAT 2002-2008 image stacks, revealing a decrease of the processing time demand to ~8 hours per image frame.