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Satellite Radar Interferometry: Application to Rabaul Caldera, Papua New Guinea

Created 16/10/2025

Updated 16/10/2025

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Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) is a geodetic monitoring tool used to measure ground deformations at cm-scale precision. InSAR has been used to study many geophysical phenomena, including volcanoes and earthquakes. This technique has yet to be applied widely in Papua New Guinea, despite its potential as a hazard monitoring tool for the numerous volcanoes in the region. This study applies InSAR to the Rabaul caldera, to investigate the feasibility of the technique in the region. This location was chosen so that the results of this study can be compared to ground based measurements provided by the Rabaul Volcano Observatory. Of the 10 radar images acquired for this study, 7 were successfully processed to form interferograms. These interferograms were then stacked together to form a time series of deformations, spanning a 14 month period from 27-2-2007 to 16-4-2008. Most of these interferograms had high coherence, and relatively low noise, and cm-scale deformations evident in the deformation time series. These results suggest that this technique is capable of detecting precursory uplift before an eruption. The primary limitations to the analysis were the availability of radar data, and the baseline separation between acquisitions. We were unable to apply temporal filtering to remove atmospheric noise, since there were too few points in the time series.

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Field Value
Title Satellite Radar Interferometry: Application to Rabaul Caldera, Papua New Guinea
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/097e570b-1312-4ff2-8a7e-5627da87bd47
Contact Point
Geoscience Australia Data
clientservices@ga.gov.au
Reference Period 20/04/2018
Geospatial Coverage
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
{
  "coordinates": [
    [
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        152.05,
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      ],
      [
        152.01667,
        -4.35
      ],
      [
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        -4.15
      ],
      [
        152.05,
        -4.15
      ],
      [
        152.05,
        -4.35
      ]
    ]
  ],
  "type": "Polygon"
}
Data Portal Geoscience Australia

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Geoscience Australia "Satellite Radar Interferometry: Application to Rabaul Caldera, Papua New Guinea". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/satellite-radar-interferometry-application-to-rabaul-caldera-papua-new-guinea