An InSAR Based Alert System for National Scale Linear Infrastructure Monitoring
Network Wide Monitoring
Ground displacement is a leading cause of damage to linear infrastructure, most notably highways, oil and gas pipelines, and railways. Mitigation of this damage relies on detecting and monitoring displacement, which can be accomplished by a variety of sensors, each with tradeoffs. While ground-based systems such as extensometers, inclinometers, surveying, in-line inspection, and field inspections can accurately track displacement at selected locations, they are not cost-effective over entire infrastructure networks.
In contrast, satellite radar remote sensing (InSAR) monitoring can provide results with higher frequency, and more data coverage regardless of weather and ground conditions. In this project, 3vGeomatics has built an integrated solution to download, process and render this data in near real-time across areas of interest that can span 1000’s of kilometres. Users can dynamically view displacement estimates and detections on a map of their study site, using only a web browser. These maps include the locations of the infrastructure being monitored, including networks of roads, railways, and transmission pipelines. It is possible for the user to view this data at the largest possible scale, and to seamlessly zoom in to smaller spatial scales to view displacement areas as small as tens of metres across. Displacement results are available to the end-user within hours of the radar data becoming available and the products can incorporate data from any of the widely available radar satellites.