EGMS-toolkit: a set of Python scripts for improved access to datasets from the European Ground Motion Service

• Published in: Earth science informatics Vol. 17; no. 4; pp. 3825 - 3837
• Main Authors: Hrysiewicz, Alexis, Khoshlahjeh Azar, Mahdi, Holohan, Eoghan P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.08.2024; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Data analysis; Datasets; Earth and Environmental Science; Earth Sciences; Earth System Sciences; Ground motion; Ground surface displacement; Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet); Interferometric synthetic aperture radar; Ontology; Satellite imagery; Simulation and Modeling; Software; Space Exploration and Astronautics; Space Sciences (including Extraterrestrial Physics; Surface motion; Synthetic aperture radar; Synthetic aperture radar interferometry; Toolkits; Workflow; InSAR ground surface deformation; Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite; InSAR toolkit; European ground motion service
• ISSN: 1865-0473; 1865-0481; 1865-0481
• DOI: 10.1007/s12145-024-01356-w

Continental-scale, open-access datasets of ground surface displacement in all countries of the European Union, plus Norway, United Kingdom, and Iceland, are now available from the European Ground Motion Service (EGMS). Under the European Union’s Copernicus program, the EGMS has been available since the end of 2022 and will continue for the foreseeable future. The EGMS data are presently derived from Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) processing of the Sentinel-1 SAR satellite imagery, which has been collected from 2015 to date. While EGMS data can be visualised and obtained through an online platform (EGMS Explorer), the data access arrangements are inefficient for large-scale analysis of ground surface displacements due to the volume of data, the tile-formatting of datasets and some server limitations. Here we present a Python-based toolkit, named EGMS-toolkit , to provide a unified and more efficient workflow for accessing EGMS datasets. The toolkit can automatically detect and download EGMS datasets based on a Region of Interest provided by users, then it can merge, clip, and crop the results to that region regardless of its scale. The toolkit then produces files of EGMS ground surface motions in GIS-ready formats for further analysis.