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MasTer: A Full Automatic Multi-Satellite InSAR Mass Processing Tool for Rapid Incremental 2D Ground Deformation Time Series
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  • Nicolas d'Oreye,
  • Dominique Derauw,
  • Delphine Smittarello,
  • Sergey Samsonov,
  • Maxime Jaspard
Nicolas d'Oreye
European Center for Geodynamics and Seismology

Corresponding Author:ndo@ecgs.lu

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Dominique Derauw
Université de Liège
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Delphine Smittarello
ISTerre Institute of Earth Sciences
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Sergey Samsonov
Natural Resources Canada
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Maxime Jaspard
European Center for Geodynamics and Seismology
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Abstract

The increasing amount of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites orbiting the Earth, their increasing time and space resolution, the variety of wavelengths, polarizations and looking geometries, the shortening of data availability latency and the lengthening of archive databases offer unprecedented opportunities for Earth observation and hazard monitoring. The downside is that it brings new challenges for processing that huge amount of data and for making the results quickly analyzable. To fully benefit from these advances in SAR, it requires efficient data processing infrastructure (optimized for processing speed, storage usage and security), efficient data visualization, and standardization of the final products for easy ingestion by conventional analysis tools. We present here the InSAR Mass processing Toolbox for Multidimensional time series (MasTer), which can combine any type of SAR data to produce unsupervised vertical and horizontal ground deformation time series. MasTer is optimized to automatically download SAR data, select the appropriate interferometric pairs, perform the interferometric mass processing, compute the geocoded deformation maps, invert and display the velocity maps and the 2D time series on a web page updated incrementally as soon as a new image is made available. The incremental architecture allows updating the time series within the shortest time possible (typically a few hours) as soon as a new SAR image is provided. Several steps are self-evaluating to ensure robust and reliable processing. Moreover, recent methodological improvement consists in the computation of a coherence proxy to guide the pair selection optimization balancing the use of each image as primary and secondary image during the differential interferometric (DInSAR) processing. Such a pair selection increases both the processing efficiency and the signal-to-noise ratio of the time series. MasTer also allows the production of time series of coherences or SAR amplitude images, which can be used e.g. for land use monitoring or geomorphological changes detection. The capabilities and performances of MasTer will be illustrated with several examples. Software and manual are available upon request from the authors.