Dr Christine Bischoff will deliver the ESE Departmental Seminar on 20 October 2022, “Monitoring mine tailings facilities with satellite radar (InSAR)”
Join us in room G41 – RSM Building – on Thursday 20 October 2022 at 12h15.
Or on Microsoft Teams: Christine Bischoff Seminar
Abstract
In recent years, in part due to several disastrous tailings dam collapses and the following tightening of regulations, InSAR (in particular Permanent Scatterer InSAR) has become a standard component of monitoring programmes in the mining industry. PSInSAR uses satellite radar images to obtain displacement time series with millimetre precision and is applicable in all stages of a mine’s life cycle, from planning, operation to closure.
InSAR adds valuable information to more traditional ground-based monitoring systems, thanks to its unique characteristics: deformation measurements can be retrieved from the entire mine site and it is ideally suited to monitor very slow, mm-scale displacements, that occur over a period of months. Especially for TSF (Tailing Storage Facilities) and in particular for tailing dams, recognising this type of slow deformation early enough is crucial to prevent failures. However, the limitations of InSAR monitoring need to be considered in order to safely and effectively interpret the data. Assessing the reliability and precision of measurements is challenging, since these are relative and derived from the statistical analysis of a whole set of radar images. Furthermore, distinguishing relevant information from noise can be challenging in datasets of millions of measurement points.
This presentation will give an overview of how InSAR monitoring is currently used in the mining industry, discuss case studies of how InSAR is applied to TSFs and to assess slope stability, and show some of the latest advances in supporting the interpretation of InSAR data.
About the speaker
Christine Bischoff (*1991, Germany) obtained her PhD at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College London, after having completed her MSci in Geophysics & Geology at the Royal School of Mines. She is now working in the software development team at TRE Altamira in Milan, Italy, with a focus on helping the adoption of InSAR satellite monitoring in the mining industry.