Skip to content

The Government of Canada's First Dedicated Volcano Monitoring System Using InSAR Technology

Drew Rotheram-Clarke1, Melanie Kelman1, Mandip Sond2, Timothy Beattie2, Chloe Lam1, Yannick Le Moigne 1

  • Affiliations: 1Geological Survey of Canada, Pacific Division, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; 2Canadian Hazards Information Service, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. 

  • Presentation type: Poster

  • Presentation time: Friday 16:30 - 18:00, Room Poster Hall

  • Poster Board Number: 45

  • Programme No: 2.3.31

  • Theme 2 > Session 3

Abstract

The west coast of Canada is home to 348 known volcanic vents Pleistocene in age or younger, at least 54 of which were active in the Holocene. Recent, noteworthy eruptions include the ~220 BP eruption at Tseax Cone which has been estimated to have caused approximately 2000 casualties from the Nis[g]{.underline}a'a Nation and the ~2360 BP Plinian eruption at Mt. Meager which had an estimated Volcanic Explosivity Index of 4. In 2021, the Geological Survey of Canada published a volcano threat ranking utilizing the methodology defined by the United States Geological Survey's (USGS) National Volcano Early Warning System. Two volcanoes, Mt. Meager (Qw'elqw'elústen) and Mt. Garibaldi (Nch'ḵay̓) ranked in the 'Very High' threat category while three additional volcanoes ranked in the 'High Threat' category. At the time of the study, no routine monitoring for magmatic unrest was conducted by the federal government. In 2019, the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM), Canada's newest generation of Earth observation satellites was launched into orbit. We demonstrate how this Synthetic Aperture RADAR (SAR) system is used to provide a cost-effective wide area monitoring system for magmatic unrest detection in Canada. We describe the cloud-based infrastructure of the fully automated InSAR monitoring system and how it ingests, processes, stores and disseminates InSAR deformation results for interpretation. We discuss the implications of high temporal revisit InSAR on temporal decorrelation and maximum observable displacement rates and present select results from the RCM Global Volcano Watch Background Mission used to validate the system performance.