Dams’ Safety

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Product Category

• Land use
• Land cover
• Natural Disaster
• Climate Change
• Coast Management 

• Marine
• Earth's Surface Motion

Financial Domains

• Investment management 
• Risk Analysis 
• Insurance management 
• Green finance

User requirements 

UN37: Projection of risk to portfolio assets into future

Description

Dams are significant infrastructure investments, which involve substantial financial commitments. Ensuring dam stability is crucial to safeguard these investments and prevent potential financial losses due to failure or costly repairs. Radar-based remote sensing like SAR can detect and monitor land subsidence near dam sites. SAR-related technologies like InSAR and DInSAR can identify and measure ground deformations over time (vertical and horizontal), enabling the identification of potential subsidence that may affect dam safety. Continuous monitoring of subsidence can help assess the stability of the surrounding area and detect any subsidence-related risks that could impact the dam's integrity.

Spatial Coverage Target

Dams’ Surrounding Area

Data Throughput

Rapid tasking 

Data availability

• High
• High

• Low
• Low

PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONS

Main processing steps

Time series SAR data covers the dam, and its surrounding area can be obtained from different sources such as Copernicus Sentinel-1 or commercial providers such as TerraSAR-X with the selection based on factors like cost, spatial and temporal resolutions required for the application. Then, SAR data should be pre-processed to correct for various artifacts and errors. This step includes calibration, atmospheric corrections, and removing noise caused by factors like topography and vegetation. By comparing the phase components of at least two SAR images captured in different times by using different DIn-SAR or PSI techniques, it is possible to calculate deformations which had occurred between sensing periods.

Input data sources

Optical:  N.A

Radar:    Sentinel-1, VHR images from different sources like ICEYE, Capella space, Umbra, and TerraSAR-X

Supporting data:   N.A

Accessibility

Sentinel-1: freely and publicly available from ESA.

VHR imagery: commercially available on demand from EO service providers.

Spatial resolution

Sentinel-1: 20 m

SAR VHR: ≤ 3 m

Frequency (Temporal resolution)

Sentinel-1: 6 days

SAR VHR: Daily

Latency

≤ 1 day

Geographical scale coverage

Globally

Delivery/ output format

Data type: Raster

File format: GeoTIFF

Accuracies

Thematic accuracy: 1 to 5 mm

Spatial accuracy: 1.5-2 pixels of input data

Constraints and limitations

• SAR signal coherence can be reduced in vegetated areas, making it challenging to monitor dam stability in regions with dense vegetation.
• Changes in the dam environment, such as construction activity or vegetation growth can cause temporal decorrelation, reducing the coherence needed for accurate deformation measurement.
• SAR data might not capture localized deformation patterns if the area of interest is smaller than the SAR pixel size.

User's level of knowledge and skills to extract information and perform further analysis on the EO products.

Skills: Ample

Knowledge: Ample

P37: Dams’ Safety

Download the product sheet gap analysis 

Maturity score

Mean: 2.4

STD: 0.80

Constraints and limitations

·   SAR signal coherence can be reduced in vegetated areas, making it challenging to monitor dam stability in regions with dense vegetation.

·   Changes in the dam environment, such as construction activity or vegetation growth can cause temporal decorrelation, reducing the coherence needed for accurate deformation measurement.

·   SAR data might not capture localized deformation patterns if the area of interest is smaller than the SAR pixel size.

Relevant user needs

UN37: Projection of risk to portfolio assets into the future.

R&D gaps

·   High cost of VHR SAR imagery which is necessary to capture small horizontal/vertical displacements.

Potential improvements drivers

·   Price models

Utilisation level review

Utilisation score

Mean: 2.5

STD: 0.50

No utilisation

Low utilisation

Medium utilisation

·   The product is already satisfying the technical and usability requirements.

·   Unawareness of the existence of the best available commercial EO product with better specifications.

High utilisation

Critical gaps related to relevant user needs

Guideline gap

UN37: Projection of risk to portfolio assets into the future.