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Comparison of InSAR time series generation techniques as part of the collaborative GeoSCIFramework research project
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  • Brianna Corsa,
  • Kristy Tiampo,
  • Krisztina Kelevitz,
  • Scott Baker,
  • Charles Meertens
Brianna Corsa
University of Colorado Boulder, CIRES

Corresponding Author:brianna.corsa@colorado.edu

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Kristy Tiampo
University of Colorado Boulder, CIRES
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Krisztina Kelevitz
University of Leeds, COMET
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Scott Baker
UNAVCO, Inc.
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Charles Meertens
UNAVCO, Inc.
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Abstract

The GeoSciFramework project (GSF), funded by the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure and NSF EarthCube programs, aims to improve intermediate-to-short term forecasts of catastrophic natural hazard events, allowing researchers to instantly detect when an event has occurred and reveal more suppressed, long-term motions of Earth’s surface at unprecedented spatial and temporal scales. These goals will be accomplished by training machine learning algorithms to recognize patterns across various data signals during geophysical events and deliver scalable, real-time data processing proficiencies for time series generation. The algorithm will employ an advanced convolutional neural network method wherein spatio-temporal analyses are informed both by physics-based models and continuous datasets, including Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), seismic, GNSS, tide gauge, and gas-emission data. The project architecture accommodates increasingly large datasets by implementing similar software packages already proven to support internet searches and intelligence gathering. This talk will focus primarily on the Differential InSAR (DInSAR) time-series analysis component, which quantifies line-of-sight (LOS) ground deformation at mm-cm spatial resolution. Here, we compare time series products generated under three different processing techniques. The first, an automated version of InSAR processing using the small baseline subset (SBAS) method performed in parallel on systems such as Generic Mapping Tool SAR (GMT5SAR) and the Generic InSAR Analysis Toolbox (GIAnT). The second method will resemble the first but will implement different processing systems for performance comparison using the InSAR Scientific Computing Environment (ISCE) and the Miami InSAR Time Series Software in Python (MintPy). The final strategy, developed by Drs. Zheng and Zebker from Stanford University, concentrates on the topographic phase component of the SAR signal so that simple cross multiplication returns an observation sequence of interferograms in geographic coordinates [Zebker, 2017]. Our results provide high-resolution views of ground motions and measure LOS deformation over both short and long periods of time.