Surface Movement Monitoring Services

Reliable Monitoring of Surface Displacements with Millimetre Precision

Whether caused by man-made activities or natural events, surface movement can be very sudden and have far-reaching effects, and may endanger infrastructure and human lives. Surface displacements are also important geophysical signals, which can be used to better understand underground geomechanical conditions and processes. Astrium Services offer accurate and reliable surface movement monitoring services.

Monitor and Ensure the Safety of Your Underground-related Operations

Astrium’s Surface Movement Monitoring Services reliably document surface displacements even in the millimetric range. This information is crucial for organisations and authorities ensuring the security or the effective performance of underground operations.

Displacements of the Earth's surface may be caused by:

Open pit and deep mining
Oil and gas production
Natural gas or CO2 storage
Infrastructure construction
Tectonic activities
Underground cavities
Excavations
Underground engineering
Groundwater changes

Surface displacements are also important geophysical signals, which can be used to better understand underground geomechanical conditions and processes.

Key Benefits

Detection of small-scale movements in millimetric range increases security and performance of operations
Reliable and consistent data acquisition ensures timely and knowledgeable decision making for the management of the operation
Reduction of project costs by applying a complementary approach: the wide area overview of surface movement helps to optimise terrestrial ground-based monitoring activities

The Surface Movement Monitoring Services Serve a Wide Range of Markets

Surface Movement Monitoring for an underground construction project in Budapest, Hungary

Oil & Gas, Mining and Energy
Oil and gas production, monitoring of natural gas and oil storage, pipeline monitoring, monitoring of mining operations. Surface movement information is valuable information for the management of the production performance, the identification of failures and for predicting potential risks for infrastructure.
Infrastructure and Engineering
new infrastructure construction, excavations, underground engineering or landslides monitoring to prevent damage to buildings and human lives
Insurance
Evaluate the risk of new construction activities or justification of compensation requests in case of existing damage due to surface movements.
Carbon market
Monitoring of underground CO₂ storage site in context with Carbon Capture and Storage

Comprehensive and Detailed Analysis and Interpretation Results

The service provided by Astrium Services includes:

detailed initial analysis of known surface movement phenomena
client-tailored project design integrating accessible ancillary information including DGPS, levelling, tiltmeter measurements and ground installations such as corner reflectors
data acquisition and processing
the integration and interpretation of results

Maps and datasets showing surface movement in the wider, surrounding operational area along with surface movement rates and individual timeline series of surface movement are delivered in a comprehensive package to each customer.

Reliable Radar Satellite Data and Interpretation Expertise

Depending on boundary conditions, user requirements and available budgets the full spectrum of available satellite sensors can be used. To ensure reliable, frequent data acquisition of the operational area and detailed identification of ground movement, high-resolution radar data acquired by TerraSAR-X is used. It is particularly suitable for monitoring faster changing surface movements with complex and/or small-scaled movement patterns, as the satellite can cover the target area as frequently as every 11 days, independent of weather conditions.

Depending on the requirements and the surface conditions different technical approaches will be chosen (e.g. Persistent Scatterer Analysis, Small Baseline Subset Analysis).

This yields point wise surface movement information with densities exceeding 10,000 points per square kilometre under optimum conditions (e.g. urban areas).