Online tools map measurements and enable non-experts to understand earthquakes, settlement, landslides and other types of land movements.

NASA is working with Fairbanks’ Alaska satellite facility to create a powerful web-based tool that will show land across North America moving to less than an inch. The online portal and its basic data set unlock a series of satellite radar measurements that can help anyone identify the location under their feet and the land under their feet, whether it is underground natural resources such as earthquakes, volcanoes, volcanic landslides, or extraction of underground natural resources such as groundwater.

The agency's NASA observation products at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Remote Sensing Analysis (Opera) program lead the end-user's observation products, which enables users to provide users with some information that would otherwise require years of training to produce. The project builds on measurements of Spaceborne synthetic aperture or SAR to generate high-resolution data on how the Earth's surface moves.

The new dataset, formally known as the North American Surface Displacement Product Suite, works with 2016 measurements, a portal that allows users to view these measurements on local, state and regional scales in seconds. For people who do not use data sets or websites, it can take several days or more to perform similar analysis.

"You can zoom in on your country, state, city neighborhoods and see how the land there moves over time," said David Bekaert, opera project manager and JPL Radar scientist. "You can see it with a simple mouse click."

The portal currently includes megapixel measurements in the metropolitan areas of the Southwest, northern Mexico and New York, each representing a 200-foot by 200-foot (60-meter-60-meter) area on the ground. By the end of 2025, Opera will add data in the United States, Central America and other parts of Canada within 120 miles (200 kilometers) of the U.S. border. When a user clicks on a pixel, the system extracts measurements from hundreds of files to create a chart that visualizes the accumulated motion of the land surface over time.

“The opera project automates the end-to-end SAR data processing system, allowing users and decision makers to focus on discovering where the land surface may move in their areas of interest,” said Gerald Bawden, a program scientist who runs opera at NASA’s headquarters in Washington. “This will save agents the potential threats that cost and time while identifying and understanding the potential threats to end users.”

For example, the Water Authority and State Geological Survey will be able to use opera products directly without the need for substantial investment in data storage, software engineering expertise, and computing muscle.

To create a displaced product, the opera team continually maps data from the ESA (European Space Agency) Sentinel-1 radar satellite, which was launched in 2014. Data from NISAR, NASA-ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) synthetic aperture radar mission will be launched earlier this year in SpaceCecraft.

Satellite-borne radar works by firing microwave pulses on the Earth's surface. Signals spread when hitting land and water, buildings and other objects. The raw data consists of the intensity and time delay of the signal echoing back to the sensor.

To understand how land moves in a given area, the Opera algorithm automates steps in an otherwise arduous process. Without opera, researchers will first download hundreds or thousands of data files, each representing a radar pass, and then make sure the data is geographically aligned and has precise coordinates over time.

They will then use a computing-intensive technique called a radar interferometer to measure the amount of land movement (if any) and the amount of movement towards the satellite, which indicates that the land is rising or away from the satellite, which means it sinks.

"The opera project has brought this capability to the masses, making it easier for state and federal agencies to access state and federal agencies and wondering 'What's going on around my house?'

Sinking land is a top priority for the Arizona Department of Water Resources. From the 1950s to the 1980s, this was the main form seen by ground movement officials, with groundwater pumping increasing as the state's population and agricultural industries grew. In 1980, the state enacted the Groundwater Management Act, which reduced the dependence on groundwater in densely populated areas and included requirements for monitoring their use.

The department used radar data from various satellites to measure this sinking in the early 2000s, combining SAR, GPS-based monitoring and traditional measurements to inform groundwater management decisions.

Now, Opera Dataset and Portal will help the agency share settlement information with officials and community members, said Brian Conway, the department’s leading hydrologist and head of geophysics division. They won't replace the SAR analysis he performed, but they will provide comparison points for his calculations. Since the dataset and portal will cover the entire state, they can also identify areas that are not known yet.

"It's a great tool to arguably give our own SAR processing a more intense look at these areas," Conway said.

Displacement products are part of a series of products issued by data products since 2023. The project began in 2020 with a multidisciplinary team of scientists at JPL working to address satellite data needs at different federal agencies. Through the Satellite Requirements Working Group, these agencies have made their requests, and the opera team is committed to improving access to information to aid a range of efforts such as disaster response, deforestation tracking and wildfire monitoring.

Andrew Wang / Jane J. Lee
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
626-379-6874 / 818-354-0307
andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov / jane.j.lee@jpl.nasa.gov

2025-076