The Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy seeks to enhance cavern stability assessment through additional monitoring methods. InSAR offers promise for detecting small elevation changes across large areas with high measurement frequency, enabling identification of unstable salt caverns prone to subsidence and sinkhole development that may require infilling. Improved understanding of cavern-surface deformation relationships would strengthen risk assessment and mitigation procedures. Previous research by Sensar and TNO (KEM-49) demonstrated InSAR's effectiveness for monitoring unstable salt caverns in the Twente region, where increasing subsidence levels signal potential sinkhole formation.
Strong subsidence observations can support data assimilation and inverse modelling to understand underlying failure mechanisms. However, existing satellite sources struggle to accurately measure surface deformation over vegetated surfaces. Current monitoring is thus restricted to infrastructure around caverns, limiting spatial coverage of accurate subsidence estimates.
Recent developments in InSAR Technology may address that. Therefore this research question builds further upon the work of KEM 49 and looks for further improvements around subsidence detection and surface deformation in the Twente region. This research should explores opportunities offered by new L-band satellite constellations, particularly the recently launched NISAR mission (2025), for enhanced salt cavern monitoring.
KEM-49b RESEARCH QUESTION
The research started in 2026 and will be carried out by Sensar.