Geoguard - An Innovative Technology Based on Low-cost GNSS Receivers to Monitor Surface Deformations

Abstract

The study of reservoir behaviour is an important topic when dealing with the removal or the injection of fluids into the underground (e.g. hydrocarbon production or natural gas storage). The monitoring of surface deformations provides a valid contribution to the analysis of the reservoir. Nowadays the InSar technique is one of the most commonly used, providing a spatial distributed information, but also GNSS geodetic receivers are able to provide continuously superficial displacements. Recent experiments have shown the possibility to obtain results similar to those of dual frequency receivers also with cheap single frequency receivers. In this work we present GeoGuard, an innovative end-to-end service, for the continuous geodetic monitoring of critical infrastructure and natural hazards based on GNSS single frequency receivers. This innovative solution would allow in principle to monitor with a moderate price a large number of points and to retrieve continuously 3D superficial deformations with millimetric accuracy. The terminal unit, called GeoGuard Monitoring Unit, has been specifically designed to operate in challenging environments, an ad-hoc processing software to deals with single frequency GNSS receivers observations has been designed and implemented too. Some results on a real experiment are reported to show the achievable accuracies of the whole system.