Nationwide ground deformation monitoring by persistent scatterer interferometry

The availability of long time series of interferometric data acquired all over the world from several synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite missions makes possible to perform a worldwide assessment of the terrain and infrastructure stability by persistent scatterer (PS) SAR interferometry techniques. This technology is computationally demanding, in particular because it requires a 3D processing. When applied to large areas, several problems have to be faced to handle huge amounts of data. In this work, we present a significant example of PS big data processing performed at national scale (the whole Italian territory) with ERS, Envisat and COSMO-SkyMed data. The main challenges and results related to this project are discussed, and the possible worldwide extension with Sentinel data is suggested.