European Ground Motion Service: a decade of Sentinel-1 observations

This work is focused on the European Ground Motion Service (EGMS), a Copernicus service based on the Persistent Scatterer Interferometry technique and satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery from Sentinel-1. The EGMS provides displacement measurements related to both natural and anthropogenic ground motion phenomena, which are standardized and harmonized across national borders over Europe. For its characteristics, EGMS represents one of the most important initiatives of this type worldwide. At the beginning of this paper, the main characteristics of EGMS are described, considering the main technical aspects involved in the service. Then, the user uptake of the service is considered by addressing three different aspects: download of the EGMS data, publication in the scientific literature, and usage beyond the academic domain. These aspects indicate a growing recognition of EGMS as a valuable tool for understanding ground deformation processes. The published studies demonstrate the wide-ranging utility of EGMS data across various applications, extending beyond academic research and benefitting also public bodies and private companies. A key section of the paper describes five representative EGMS applications. Two studies concern local areas, while the other ones involve wide-area EGMS data and analyses on national scale, with the potential to be extended to the entire continent. In the last part of the paper, the evolution of EGMS is addressed. A stepwise extension of EGMS towards global coverage is foreseen, creating the so-called Copernicus Global Ground Motion Service (CGGMS). A roadmap for the EGMS extension to CGGMS is outlined, starting from Europe up to reaching a global scale. Other aspects include the use of L-band data from ROSE-L and NISAR, and C-band data from Sentinel-1 Next Generation data.