SUBCOAST

A collaborative project aimed at developing a GMES-service for monitoring and forecasting subsidence hazards in coastal areas around Europe

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 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'The objective of SubCoast will be to develop a service for monitoring the extent and impact of subsidence in coastal lowlands and demonstrate its capability in various pilots for a variety of settings around Europe. The service will be designed to appropriately determine the effects of subsidence on current and future floodrisk in coastal lowlands, monitor the integrity of coastal barrier systems and infrastructure and assess the impact of subsidence due to natural or man-made causes (groundwater pumping and oil/gas production) on land use and hydrology. SubCoast will be built on the heritage of GMES Service Element ‘Terrafirma’ and use the full capability of PS-InSAR as a earth observation technology for large scale subsidence mapping. Necessary R&D will be focused on possible augmentation of datasources and the improvement of retrieval algorithms. Subsequent validation efforts will make full use of the Terrafirma Validation Testsite and other current validation initiatives. A distributed data and information system will be set up which facilitates the accessibility and operability of EO-data, in-situ data (including geoscientific data) and model results for the selected areas. SubCoast will orient its services along existing guidelines established in previous GMES-projects, notably ‘Terrafirma’, and in line with relevant directives at European Level. End-user involvement will be realised by establishing a user federation which holds the most directly involved regional, national and European stakeholders.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

Coastal lowlands are threatened by processes affecting land elevation as well as mean sea level. EU-funded scientists have expanded the European Earth observation (EO) programme Copernicus to include a module that pieces together the relative motions of the two environments to assess land subsidence hazards.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

Land in low-lying coastal areas is subject to settling, sinking and compacting as a result of various natural and human-induced processes. Among these are land movements, removal of underlying supporting materials by mining, groundwater pumping, oil or gas extraction, and compaction caused by increased loads on the land surface.

Given the imminent adverse effects of climate change and increased human activity, scientists initiated the EU-funded http://www.subcoast.eu/ (SUBCOAST) project to develop a subsidence hazards forecasting service. The new service will form a key module of Copernicus (formerly named Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES)).

The service was designed with user needs in mind to appropriately assess the impact of subsidence on flood risk and to monitor the integrity of coastal barrier systems. For the core product of the service, SUBCOAST scientists have implemented a new concept based on so-called dynamic digital elevation models (DEMs).

The approach chosen by SUBCOAST scientists was to estimate absolute velocities and heights, where well-defined geodetic data are available for both land and sea level. Digital elevation maps were produced by combining satellite with terrestrial and modelling data. The final dynamic DEM product is the result of rigorous work at pilot study regions, covering different scenarios that may prevail on the coast of Europe.

A prototype web portal was designed enabling interested users to assimilate data from multiple sources. Among these are hydrogeological data, in combination with persistent scatterer interferometry data.

SUBCOAST scientists built on the achievements the European Space Agency (ESA) project Terrafirma that had demonstrated the applicability of satellite interferometry in ground motion hazard assessment. Their research focused on the augmentation of data sources and the improvement of retrieval algorithms.

The SUBCOAST project expanded Copernicus services with a downstream service for monitoring the extent and impact of subsidence on Europe's low-lying coastal regions. The regular acquisition of radar data from EO satellites will help flood-risk practitioners to accurately estimate subsidence rates, something that was difficult in the past.