Expanding the InSAR Community

For the last 20 years, space agencies have launched multiple satellites into space to monitor and record Earth-surface changes with greater ease than a single land-based instrument. Scientists then use the information these satellites collect to help them study geological disasters such as volcanoes and landslides.

Earlier this month, ICTP hosted the "Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar: A Global Solution to Geological Hazards," which included state-of-the-art lectures and practical sessions. The sessions were dedicated to helping scientists in developing countries process and utilize data taken from instruments using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), a radar technique that measures how Earth's surface is changing over days, months and years. Abdelkrim Aoudia, a scientist with ICTP's Earth System Physics section who specializes in solid-Earth geophysics, organized the conference together with Ian Hamling, a former ICTP postdoc who is now at GNS New Zealand, and Tim Wright of the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds, UK.

Most SAR data is now open source, meaning it's available to anyone, anywhere at any time, Aoudia says. And applications to use this data for monitoring the activity of earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides and land subsidence are well developed in the science community, but developing countries make little use of it. The trick is knowing what to do with the data once you have it.

First, you must know how to process the data and second you must apply the appropriate modeling tools to understand the physics behind the geological disasters you're studying. These two steps are the prominent barriers preventing scientists in the developing world from using readily available InSAR data concerning their country. Conferences like ICTP's, therefore, are important and help in building an InSAR community in developing countries, Aoudia says.

Even at a global scale, SAR remains underutilized. Nowadays, the challenge stands in taking full advantage of past and present SAR data from the many different instruments and using it for better disaster preparedness and response.

The first three days of the conference comprised theoretical lectures on how InSAR works and a fresh update from satellite providers like ESA, COSMO-Sky-Med and WinSAR on the existing and future missions as well as several lectures on a variety of InSAR applications. The last two days were dedicated to intense, practical sessions, which involved hands-on data processing.

Full details of the sessions as well as lecture notes are available from the conference website.