My research uses satellite radar interferometry (InSAR) to measure millimeter-level changes to Earth’s surface over time. InSAR has a huge variety of geophysical applications, like mapping ground deformation due to the 2018 eruption of Kilauea:
At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I led the algorithm development team for the OPERA Sentinel-1 Surface Displacement product, the first continental-scale InSAR ground motion product over North America.
Shown above is a screenshot of the Displacement Portal, built by the Alaska Satellite Facility to browse the Displacement Products. The portal displays a “filtered” version of the displacement to highlight local displacement signals, like the ongoing deformation at Edgecumbe Volcano in Alaska:
During my Ph.D., I used InSAR to monitor surface changes over the Permian Basin in West Texas, the largest oil-producing region in the United States. To help mitigate the rising number of induced earthquakes, I worked with geologists and seismologists to deliver observational datasets and help understand the causes of the earthquakes. You can read reporting using my InSAR data on the recent implications from Bloomberg (video here).
You can find my full publication list on my Google Scholar profile, or browse my open source software associated with my research.
I presented two talks at the EarthScope 2025 ISCE Short Course:
dolphin for high resolution PS/DS processingNear-real-time estimation of ground displacement time series with InSAR
<!– Below is an interactive map to play around with the cumulative vertical deformation between November 2014 and January 2019 from our paper:
Staniewicz et al., “InSAR reveals complex surface deformation patterns over an 80,000 square kilometer oil-producing region in the Permian Basin”, Geophysical Research Letters (2020): 2020GL090151
The red areas show uplift (up to ~7cm), blue areas show subsidence (down to ~13 cm), and dark red dots are the locations of the TexNet detected earthquakes in 2018. You can also download all the deformation data products shown in the paper at the Texas data repository