Landslide Motion Monitoring

Most slopes that fail were moving first, often for years, at rates of millimetres per year that nothing on the ground detects. Radar interferometry measures exactly that, from orbit, over whole regions, without instrumenting anything. The service builds a displacement time series for every coherent point on a slope, produces a velocity map, and flags where velocity is increasing, because acceleration rather than velocity is what precedes failure.

Combining ascending and descending passes separates vertical from east-west movement, which distinguishes a slope creeping downhill from ground subsiding beneath it. Layering deformation over terrain, land cover and rainfall history yields a susceptibility model that is dynamic rather than static: not just where a landslide could occur, but where the ground is currently telling you it might.