N. Pierdicca 1 , F. Rocca 2 , P. Basili 3 , S. Bonafoni 3 , G. Carlesimo 4 , D. Cimini 5 , P. Ciotti 4 , R. Ferretti 4 , F.S. Marzano 1 , V. Mattioli 3 , M. Montopoli 4 , R. Notarpietro 6 , D. Perissin 7 , E. Pichelli 4 , B. Rommen 8 , S. Reising 9 , G. Venuti 2 1 Sapienza Univ. of Rome,  2 Politechnic of Milan,  3 University of Perugia,  4 Univ. of L'Aquila,  5 IMAA-CNR,  6 Politechnic of Turin,  7 Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong,  8 ESA/ESTEC 9 Colorado State University SYNERGIC USE OF EO, NWP AND GROUND BASED MEASUREMENTS FOR THE MITIGATION OF VAPOUR ARTEFACTS IN SAR INTERFEROMETRY
Introduction SAR interferometric maps displays not only very small terrain motions, but also the so called  Atmospheric Phase Screen , i.e., the excess path delay mainly associated to the variable columnar amount of water vapor at the time of the passage, that delays the e.m. wave.  The atmospheric contribution to the interferograms is a major artifact to be corrected to get reliable motion estimates. By PS multipass techniques and for long term displacements APS’s can be retrieved and could provide a valuable information on the atmospheric conditions at very good spatial resolution  Note that interferometric measurements are doubly differential as they are time differences referred to a single point in each image, that is constrained to be stationary in time.  Outline I will briefly review  the  METAWAVE  (Mitigation of Electromagnetic Transmission errors induced by Atmospheric Water Vapor Effects) ESA sponsored study. We focus on the exercise to assimilate APS derived information on water vapor within Numerical Weather Prediction models
METAWAVE project Funded by ESA/ESTEC Objectives Use any additional information to correct, at list partially (mitigate), the atmospheric  WV artefacts  in InSAR Assess usefulness of InSAR  for   atmospheric applications  and particularly weather prediction Requirements  for InSAR are very demanding: resolution order of 100 m thematic accuracy order of mm   ZWD  (  0.16 mm    IWV ) Timeliness
Project activities During the METAWAVE project  several techniques  have been exploited to map path delay due to water vapor: Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models Earth Observation products Ground based microwave radiometers and GPS receivers Data interpolation and downscaling processing techniques Tomographic techniques Two  experiments  were set up Rome area: regional scale applications and ground based microwave radiometers (including Colorado State University CMR for 3-D tomography) Como area: local scale applications by exploiting a dense network of GPS receivers
Regional scale: Rome experiment setup Radiosonde launch 8 launched from Sapienza, 6 successful  4 Daytime, 2 nighttime 75 from nearby operational station  10 km 5 km Radiometers and LIDARS One 2-channel + one 4-channel  LIDAR nearby Two other 4-channel to form a triangle   Colosseo
Local scale: Como experiment setup Regional operational GPS network Intermediate GPS network Local network
From PS to APS On land, numerous scatterers exist that maintain their scattering characteristics very stable in time (the  Persistent Scatterers : PS).  Once these points are detected, their apparent motion can be recorded from the phase of the radar returns with millimeter precision.  The atmosphere, particularly due to the high water vapour spatial and temporal variability, introduces an unknown delay in the signal propagation (the  Atmospheric Phase Screen : APS).  Under certain hypothesis and using a huge number of interferograms the apparent motion of the  PS ’s due to the  APS ‘s can be singled out wrt to real displacements and APS’s can be estimated
Samples of APS’s of PS’s  Winter  Summer
The APS and the atmosphere Atmospheric path delay  L  can be converted into (columnar) Integrated Water Vapor (IWV) and passed to the meteorologists.  InSAR could become a tool for high resolution water vapour retrieval and provide routinely water vapour maps to be assimilated into high resolution Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models. A major difficulty is associated to the differential nature of the APS. APS's provide an insuperable high resolution mapping of the atmospheric path delay differences (i.e., in time and  space ) over stable PS’s, but they do not furnish absolute values.  This difficulty can be overcome by relating on external information providing suitable climatological values in order to provide the reference atmospheric signal associated to the master SAR image of the interferometric stack which cannot be known using SAR data only.
From APS to water vapour DInSAR interferometric phase contains  DISPL acement phase    and excess path  ATMO spheric delay  L   differentiated wrt time  i  and  j  and referred to point  x 0 For a steady (or known motion) surface,   DISPL   =0  (or known) and an image sequence provides the atmospheric delay ( APS ) in each point  x  wrt a unique master  j=M , with arbitrary unknown  const i =   /4   iM    ( x 0 ) :  L  has a dry and a wet component, the latter proportional to the Integrated Water Vapour ( IWV )  One could derive the “absolute” atmospheric delay at time  i , and than the wet contribution proportional to  IWV , assuming the master contribution is known by  EXT ernal sources (e.g., NWP, EO products): The associated error variance is a combination of  APS  error and  EXT ernal  source error, which can be significant:   L =    APS +    EXT
From APS to water vapour Alternatively, by averaging many APS’s and corresponding  EXT ernal information : Again using an  EXT ernal source one can estimate the master contribution and than the actual “absolute” atmospheric delay from  APS  by: Which is more reliably since the associated error variance depends on error variance of the mean  L  field provided by the  EXT ernal source, which is much smaller than that of an individual  L EXT  field:    L =    APS +    MeanAPS +   MeanEXT There still an ambiguity due to  const  which can be removed by relying on  EXT ernal sources provided by NWP or independent EO products (e.g. MERIS). Absolute path delay, or its wet component proportional to  IWV , can be assimilated into NWP.
The water vapour maps from APS The local circulation in the urban area of Rome was studied using the high-resolution Mesoscale Model (MM5) and Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model.  These are well established fully compressible non-hydrostatic NWP models, reaching resolution of 1 km or higher. A long sequence of ASAR images has been processed to derive APS maps, subsequently converted to absolute IWV maps by using as  climatological background  and bias ( const ) correction the MERIS IWV products. Basically InSAR provides small scale components of the vapour field, whereas the large scale (including mean) of traditional meteo data is retained
The water vapour maps from APS APS turned into absolute IWV (left  panel), known except a constant, using MM5 as external background and then embedded into MM5 map (right panel) Note  higher map resolution inside the SAR frame
Assimilation experiment MM5: 4 domains 2 way nested, 1km resolution for inner domain, 33    levels Initialization:  warm start  to assimilate APS derived IPWV on 3/10/2008 at 9:30 UTC, being the ECMWF initial conditions only available at synoptic hours MM5 nested domains Questions :  Are the NWP outputs sensitive to the  assimilation of APS small scale features ? Is the effect positive ? MERIS used as completely independent background to produce IWV from APS Case study during the Metawave experiment in Rome to be compared to ground truth (October 3, 2008)
Assimilation of InSAR derived IWV x b   is the atmospheric “background” status B  and  O  are the covariance matrix of background field and observation  errors H ( x )   is the observation operator and  Q v   is the mixing ratio [g/kg]
MM5 assimilation results MM5 (1 km) hourly rain rate field at 17:00 UTC compared to interpolated raingauge (right panel) at 20:00 UTC SAR assimilation (top-right)  doesn’t correct MM5 time anticipation (3h) of maximum rain.  It reduces overestimation (>18 mm/h vs observed 16 mm/h) produced by MM5 without SAR (top-left) Interpolated rain gauges MM5 + APS MM5 without APS
WRF assimilation results WRF time anticipation only 1 hour in both cases SAR assimilation (top-right)  again better reproduces the observed rainrate values Interpolated raingauges WRF + APS WRF without APS
Conclusions The METAWAVE project has been quickly reviewed A strategy to assimilate InSAR APS into NWP has been illustrated It was  shown that, using APS, NWP forecasts can be improved, albeit slightly. More can  be done: Running models at higher resolution to retain the high frequency structures of InSAR data. Assimilating directly the path delay  L  instead of  IWV Making the warm start more reliable by using local observations Avoiding the 3DVAR geostrophyc adjustment of the meteorological fields to the large scale Future availability of low revisit time SAR’s (e.g., Sentinel 1) could  ring the change for the use of InSAR for meteorological purposes
Thank you for your attention
Triple collocation It is useful to validate measuring systems when none of them are immune from errors (apart biases). Suppose three measurement systems  X ,  Y , and  Z  measuring a true variable  t  (IWV in our case).  It is assumed that systems  X  and  Y  can resolve smaller scales than system  Z  by introducing  r 2  as the variance common to these smaller scales.  Variable  t  with variance   2   refers to the large scale features of the observed field and has  By collecting observations collocated in time and space, from a statistical analysis it is possible to estimate error variances and scaling factors   x ,   y  ,   z  are random zero-mean observation errors  Errors have variances   x 2 ,   y 2 ,   z 2   s y ,  s z  are scaling factors
Triple collocation results We applied the triple collocation techniques to data collected during METAWAVE in Rome We identified  GPS  ( X ) and MERIS ( Y ) as the systems providing IWV at the smaller scale, whereas MM5 ( Z ) is supposed to be less resolved  Assuming different hypothesis for  r 2  we found the following: MERIS exhibits smaller random error ( ≈0 .8 mm IWV or 5 mm  L ) wrt GPS ( ≈1 .1 mm IWV, 7 mm  L ) and calibration factor similar to GPS (0.99)  MM5 shows larger error ( ≈  1.5 mm) and underestimation of IWV (0.88)
Project rationales As for no sudden,  long term ,  ground motion,  multi-pass technique  can mitigate path delay artifacts and provide APS to meteorologists, to be exploited for other applications.  For sudden,  short term , ground motion and/or traditional (few passes) InSAR, two frameworks are identified: Regional scale  applications  Relaxed spatial resolution (goal 1 km), integration of many data sources by interpolation/downscaling, and NWP model assimilation Local scale  applications Small coverage, support of ground based systems (e.g., GPS, radiometers) Averaging not possible. Need for non-SAR APS estimates ! Short term Need for high-resolution nearby PS estimates Averaging possible. Are APS useful for WV mapping ? Long  term Local scale Regional scale
SAR and Permanent Scatterers (PS) Pisa Livorno Migliarino Arno Serchio R 1 R 2   r PS PS VS VS VS VS
PS displacement time series Non linear motion or noise or  atmospheric delay residuals (APS) Linear motion  [mm] 1 rad ≈5mm
Atmosphere properties from APS Semivariogram of the APS’s derived from a huge number of interferograms, providing an insight into the spatial distribution of the water vapour at small scale (Ferretti et al.). An example of using APS for atmospheric studies,

Pierdicca-Igarss2011_july2011.ppt

  • 1.
    N. Pierdicca 1, F. Rocca 2 , P. Basili 3 , S. Bonafoni 3 , G. Carlesimo 4 , D. Cimini 5 , P. Ciotti 4 , R. Ferretti 4 , F.S. Marzano 1 , V. Mattioli 3 , M. Montopoli 4 , R. Notarpietro 6 , D. Perissin 7 , E. Pichelli 4 , B. Rommen 8 , S. Reising 9 , G. Venuti 2 1 Sapienza Univ. of Rome, 2 Politechnic of Milan, 3 University of Perugia, 4 Univ. of L'Aquila, 5 IMAA-CNR, 6 Politechnic of Turin, 7 Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong, 8 ESA/ESTEC 9 Colorado State University SYNERGIC USE OF EO, NWP AND GROUND BASED MEASUREMENTS FOR THE MITIGATION OF VAPOUR ARTEFACTS IN SAR INTERFEROMETRY
  • 2.
    Introduction SAR interferometricmaps displays not only very small terrain motions, but also the so called Atmospheric Phase Screen , i.e., the excess path delay mainly associated to the variable columnar amount of water vapor at the time of the passage, that delays the e.m. wave. The atmospheric contribution to the interferograms is a major artifact to be corrected to get reliable motion estimates. By PS multipass techniques and for long term displacements APS’s can be retrieved and could provide a valuable information on the atmospheric conditions at very good spatial resolution Note that interferometric measurements are doubly differential as they are time differences referred to a single point in each image, that is constrained to be stationary in time. Outline I will briefly review the METAWAVE (Mitigation of Electromagnetic Transmission errors induced by Atmospheric Water Vapor Effects) ESA sponsored study. We focus on the exercise to assimilate APS derived information on water vapor within Numerical Weather Prediction models
  • 3.
    METAWAVE project Fundedby ESA/ESTEC Objectives Use any additional information to correct, at list partially (mitigate), the atmospheric WV artefacts in InSAR Assess usefulness of InSAR for atmospheric applications and particularly weather prediction Requirements for InSAR are very demanding: resolution order of 100 m thematic accuracy order of mm  ZWD (  0.16 mm  IWV ) Timeliness
  • 4.
    Project activities Duringthe METAWAVE project several techniques have been exploited to map path delay due to water vapor: Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models Earth Observation products Ground based microwave radiometers and GPS receivers Data interpolation and downscaling processing techniques Tomographic techniques Two experiments were set up Rome area: regional scale applications and ground based microwave radiometers (including Colorado State University CMR for 3-D tomography) Como area: local scale applications by exploiting a dense network of GPS receivers
  • 5.
    Regional scale: Romeexperiment setup Radiosonde launch 8 launched from Sapienza, 6 successful 4 Daytime, 2 nighttime 75 from nearby operational station 10 km 5 km Radiometers and LIDARS One 2-channel + one 4-channel LIDAR nearby Two other 4-channel to form a triangle Colosseo
  • 6.
    Local scale: Comoexperiment setup Regional operational GPS network Intermediate GPS network Local network
  • 7.
    From PS toAPS On land, numerous scatterers exist that maintain their scattering characteristics very stable in time (the Persistent Scatterers : PS). Once these points are detected, their apparent motion can be recorded from the phase of the radar returns with millimeter precision. The atmosphere, particularly due to the high water vapour spatial and temporal variability, introduces an unknown delay in the signal propagation (the Atmospheric Phase Screen : APS). Under certain hypothesis and using a huge number of interferograms the apparent motion of the PS ’s due to the APS ‘s can be singled out wrt to real displacements and APS’s can be estimated
  • 8.
    Samples of APS’sof PS’s Winter Summer
  • 9.
    The APS andthe atmosphere Atmospheric path delay L can be converted into (columnar) Integrated Water Vapor (IWV) and passed to the meteorologists. InSAR could become a tool for high resolution water vapour retrieval and provide routinely water vapour maps to be assimilated into high resolution Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models. A major difficulty is associated to the differential nature of the APS. APS's provide an insuperable high resolution mapping of the atmospheric path delay differences (i.e., in time and space ) over stable PS’s, but they do not furnish absolute values. This difficulty can be overcome by relating on external information providing suitable climatological values in order to provide the reference atmospheric signal associated to the master SAR image of the interferometric stack which cannot be known using SAR data only.
  • 10.
    From APS towater vapour DInSAR interferometric phase contains DISPL acement phase  and excess path ATMO spheric delay L differentiated wrt time i and j and referred to point x 0 For a steady (or known motion) surface,  DISPL =0 (or known) and an image sequence provides the atmospheric delay ( APS ) in each point x wrt a unique master j=M , with arbitrary unknown const i =   /4   iM  ( x 0 ) : L has a dry and a wet component, the latter proportional to the Integrated Water Vapour ( IWV ) One could derive the “absolute” atmospheric delay at time i , and than the wet contribution proportional to IWV , assuming the master contribution is known by EXT ernal sources (e.g., NWP, EO products): The associated error variance is a combination of APS error and EXT ernal source error, which can be significant:   L =   APS +   EXT
  • 11.
    From APS towater vapour Alternatively, by averaging many APS’s and corresponding EXT ernal information : Again using an EXT ernal source one can estimate the master contribution and than the actual “absolute” atmospheric delay from APS by: Which is more reliably since the associated error variance depends on error variance of the mean L field provided by the EXT ernal source, which is much smaller than that of an individual L EXT field:   L =   APS +   MeanAPS +   MeanEXT There still an ambiguity due to const which can be removed by relying on EXT ernal sources provided by NWP or independent EO products (e.g. MERIS). Absolute path delay, or its wet component proportional to IWV , can be assimilated into NWP.
  • 12.
    The water vapourmaps from APS The local circulation in the urban area of Rome was studied using the high-resolution Mesoscale Model (MM5) and Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. These are well established fully compressible non-hydrostatic NWP models, reaching resolution of 1 km or higher. A long sequence of ASAR images has been processed to derive APS maps, subsequently converted to absolute IWV maps by using as climatological background and bias ( const ) correction the MERIS IWV products. Basically InSAR provides small scale components of the vapour field, whereas the large scale (including mean) of traditional meteo data is retained
  • 13.
    The water vapourmaps from APS APS turned into absolute IWV (left panel), known except a constant, using MM5 as external background and then embedded into MM5 map (right panel) Note higher map resolution inside the SAR frame
  • 14.
    Assimilation experiment MM5:4 domains 2 way nested, 1km resolution for inner domain, 33  levels Initialization: warm start to assimilate APS derived IPWV on 3/10/2008 at 9:30 UTC, being the ECMWF initial conditions only available at synoptic hours MM5 nested domains Questions : Are the NWP outputs sensitive to the assimilation of APS small scale features ? Is the effect positive ? MERIS used as completely independent background to produce IWV from APS Case study during the Metawave experiment in Rome to be compared to ground truth (October 3, 2008)
  • 15.
    Assimilation of InSARderived IWV x b is the atmospheric “background” status B and O are the covariance matrix of background field and observation errors H ( x ) is the observation operator and Q v is the mixing ratio [g/kg]
  • 16.
    MM5 assimilation resultsMM5 (1 km) hourly rain rate field at 17:00 UTC compared to interpolated raingauge (right panel) at 20:00 UTC SAR assimilation (top-right) doesn’t correct MM5 time anticipation (3h) of maximum rain. It reduces overestimation (>18 mm/h vs observed 16 mm/h) produced by MM5 without SAR (top-left) Interpolated rain gauges MM5 + APS MM5 without APS
  • 17.
    WRF assimilation resultsWRF time anticipation only 1 hour in both cases SAR assimilation (top-right) again better reproduces the observed rainrate values Interpolated raingauges WRF + APS WRF without APS
  • 18.
    Conclusions The METAWAVEproject has been quickly reviewed A strategy to assimilate InSAR APS into NWP has been illustrated It was shown that, using APS, NWP forecasts can be improved, albeit slightly. More can be done: Running models at higher resolution to retain the high frequency structures of InSAR data. Assimilating directly the path delay L instead of IWV Making the warm start more reliable by using local observations Avoiding the 3DVAR geostrophyc adjustment of the meteorological fields to the large scale Future availability of low revisit time SAR’s (e.g., Sentinel 1) could ring the change for the use of InSAR for meteorological purposes
  • 19.
    Thank you foryour attention
  • 20.
    Triple collocation Itis useful to validate measuring systems when none of them are immune from errors (apart biases). Suppose three measurement systems X , Y , and Z measuring a true variable t (IWV in our case). It is assumed that systems X and Y can resolve smaller scales than system Z by introducing r 2 as the variance common to these smaller scales. Variable t with variance  2 refers to the large scale features of the observed field and has By collecting observations collocated in time and space, from a statistical analysis it is possible to estimate error variances and scaling factors  x ,  y ,  z are random zero-mean observation errors Errors have variances  x 2 ,  y 2 ,  z 2 s y , s z are scaling factors
  • 21.
    Triple collocation resultsWe applied the triple collocation techniques to data collected during METAWAVE in Rome We identified GPS ( X ) and MERIS ( Y ) as the systems providing IWV at the smaller scale, whereas MM5 ( Z ) is supposed to be less resolved Assuming different hypothesis for r 2 we found the following: MERIS exhibits smaller random error ( ≈0 .8 mm IWV or 5 mm L ) wrt GPS ( ≈1 .1 mm IWV, 7 mm L ) and calibration factor similar to GPS (0.99) MM5 shows larger error ( ≈ 1.5 mm) and underestimation of IWV (0.88)
  • 22.
    Project rationales Asfor no sudden, long term , ground motion, multi-pass technique can mitigate path delay artifacts and provide APS to meteorologists, to be exploited for other applications. For sudden, short term , ground motion and/or traditional (few passes) InSAR, two frameworks are identified: Regional scale applications Relaxed spatial resolution (goal 1 km), integration of many data sources by interpolation/downscaling, and NWP model assimilation Local scale applications Small coverage, support of ground based systems (e.g., GPS, radiometers) Averaging not possible. Need for non-SAR APS estimates ! Short term Need for high-resolution nearby PS estimates Averaging possible. Are APS useful for WV mapping ? Long term Local scale Regional scale
  • 23.
    SAR and PermanentScatterers (PS) Pisa Livorno Migliarino Arno Serchio R 1 R 2   r PS PS VS VS VS VS
  • 24.
    PS displacement timeseries Non linear motion or noise or atmospheric delay residuals (APS) Linear motion  [mm] 1 rad ≈5mm
  • 25.
    Atmosphere properties fromAPS Semivariogram of the APS’s derived from a huge number of interferograms, providing an insight into the spatial distribution of the water vapour at small scale (Ferretti et al.). An example of using APS for atmospheric studies,