After a career in remote sensing I’ve still not gotten used to the surprise I’m met with when I describe the capabilities brought to bear by satellite SAR interferometry. I’d trade the mystique for understanding any day. This is no brand new technological break through we’re talking about. This is a tool you can, and should, integrate into your daily use if you work in an industry that benefits from the knowledge of how this world moves, and moved in the past.

Let’s take a look at the evolution of our discipline in the practice of InSAR. We can start by considering the most common technological tool that everyone has in their pocket. Let's compare the mobile phone available on those days of the development of InSAR. Relative to the computing, networking, and imaging technology that existed when you were born; you are essentially a super human capable of leveraging more capabilities in each moment than you could in the prior, and this, this is one of them!

Early 90’s: InSAR shows up in the larger scientific community

InSAR becomes a known technique and appears on the covers of scientific journals mainly thanks to the interferograms of earthquakes.
However, from the sensor perspective, this story of ours starts an even longer time before!
(Yet, if you take a look at our 007 blog you’ll see it’s military life actually began much, much sooner).

Late 90's-early 2000: development of A-DInSAR techniques

Advanced differential interferometric synthetic aperture radar - go ahead type it in a web search for publications and scroll that clock on back.
P.S. - Yes, this industry is full of acronyms such as A-DInSAR which includes the sub-discipline of PS-InSAR (persistent scatter) those nice dot visuals you may be familiar with.

2007-10s: orbiting of civilian higher-res radar satellites &
new algorithms for A-DInSAR

The industry started to flip open the future of capabilities in computing and commercialisation.
This is big, big data at the terabyte scale. Old school computing was so cost prohibitive it made wide processing impractical and costly for the vast majority of users.

2014: first constellation of open SAR data changed the world

The joint EU/ESA Sentinel 1 mission!
This new raw data source lowers per sample costs from thousands of dollars to zero.
This supports the development of new, faster, more advanced, post-processing platforms, and companies, like ours to thrive at the junction of lower cost faster computing and more widely available input data.

2020's: constellations increase dramatically

Low launch costs and the stable availability of venture capital for space companies empowers the orbiting of dozens of small radar satellites from private companies ICEYE, Capella, Umbra and others in the imaging business.
Governments continue the development of the large satellite platforms needed for SAR/InSAR applications.

When you can pick 2-3 steps listed above and place it beside the equivalent level of "consumer technology" at the time, does it seem so “new” and “black magic”? … No! It’s simply that this is a nuanced and admittedly complex technique that existed largely in the military and academic worlds. One principally full of super-experts, that have spent a really, really …. really, long time working to make this understandable to super-experts in other disciplines.

You, yes you, should use InSAR in your daily work. If you don’t, it will be there just the same. It will be looking and watching your project, your house, your commute to work, every day, and you’ll be just ignoring that capability. Blissfully hoping that you’re so busy using other techniques your clients are comfortable with this proven technology will simply slip off into the ether. The trouble is that the raw data is available to everyone, and anyone with the capability can process it and use it to determine deformation at any time. There’s an undeniable advantage to being the first to at least suggest this approach; let alone actually reveal the data that’s been all around you for so long.

It has served tens of thousands of clients globally. Based on tens of thousands of peer reviewed academic papers, to which we’ve contributed dozens!

Yes, there are many nuances, many things you should consider. As any other hi-tech solution, you need to know how it works to use it properly, and take benefit from this!

This is why one of the missions of EO59 is to cover this gap. We do believe that KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER is the key for YOUR success.

We love to give you not a black box product but to explain how it works inside and out! We are here to provide one of the most effective, accurate deformation data analytics in the world. That alongside consulting and, ultimately, our software with training, to leave you decide how enter in the InSAR world. You as a final user, an operator, and an expert in interpreting InSAR data.

As an American and European company we believe in the biggest gift to human beings: freedom! We love the idea to cooperate with our clients giving them access to the technology and the data in the way THEY decide is the best for them!

I’m talking to you: the geotechnical engineers, the civil structural engineers, the hydrologists studying aquifers, and particularly the ones who are using traditional survey and LiDAR as part of their daily life wishing they could send your surveyor, his theodolite and his drone in a time machine! If you’ve the need to determine the motion of a landslide in the past, or it’s current rate of motion we’re here. If you’ve got a retention wall and need to know when it started to fail, we’ll go back in time and determine when, and by how much. If you’ve a road surface, structure, mine, or hydro dam and you’re curious to know about it’s motion on February 2016, we’re here. Countless additional applications that are just waiting for you to discover are here for you in the world of satellite InSAR.

Bringing that up I want to address the point that satellite InSAR does not necessarily replace other techniques. It gives you the ability to determine the deformation of a target in the PAST nearly anywhere on the Earth. This is from the use of vast satellite SAR archives. We can also monitor vast areas that are impractical with other techniques. However, our discipline is opportunistic and as such when you need to see a specific point not observable naturally, if you don’t want to use artificial reflectors, you’ll need to use another technique. As with all tools, they augment one another in bringing value to the community we serve.

If you are currently implementing satellite InSAR as part of your daily use already, or if you’re finally ready to begin, we are here for you. Today, today is the day you’re more capable than ever.

The Invisible, Reliable, Daily, Deformation Tool - Satellite InSAR