InSAR Norway for risk mitigation, adaptation, and resilience

InSAR Norway is a national ground motion monitoring service that uses satellite-based Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) to systematically detect and map land movement across Norway. By combining regular Sentinel-1 radar observations with advanced processing and interpretation, the service provides nationwide information on ground deformation with millimetre-scale precision.

This service has been established to support public authorities, infrastructure owners, researchers, and other users who need reliable information about land movement in a changing climate. Norway faces a wide range of ground instability challenges, including unstable rock slopes, landslides, subsidence in urban areas, and deformation affecting roads, railways, dams, and other critical infrastructure. By providing regular nationwide coverage, InSAR Norway helps users identify where change is happening, where conditions appear stable, and where closer investigation may be needed.

A key outcome of InSAR Norway is improved risk mitigation through early identification of unstable ground conditions. The service helps reveal patterns of movement that may otherwise remain unnoticed until damage occurs or hazards escalate. This supports more preventive planning, more targeted field investigations, and more efficient use of resources. It also helps decision-makers prioritise follow-up efforts and respond earlier to emerging ground instability.

Today, InSAR Norway is fully operational and continuously updated, and it has become an important part of Norway’s geospatial infrastructure. By turning satellite observations into accessible and actionable information, the service strengthens national capacity for risk reduction, climate adaptation, and long-term resilience.

Norway faces many challenges linked to ground movement, including unstable rock slopes, landslides, subsidence in urban areas, and deformation affecting roads, railways, dams, buildings, and other critical infrastructure. These challenges are becoming more important in a changing climate, where shifts in precipitation, snowmelt, erosion, and freeze-thaw conditions can affect slope stability and ground conditions. At the same time, there is a need for better overview and earlier insight. Ground investigations and local monitoring remain essential, but they are often limited to specific sites and require significant time and resources. InSAR Norway was established to complement these methods by providing regular, nationwide information on where the ground is moving and where further attention may be needed. The service supports public authorities, infrastructure owners, researchers, and planners by helping them screen large areas, prioritise follow-up, and strengthen the basis for land-use planning, risk assessment, and infrastructure management. In this way, satellite-based observations become a practical source of decision support, used in combination with geological knowledge, field observations, and other monitoring data.

InSAR Norway provides ground deformation information derived from satellite radar observations. The main products include ground deformation maps and time series that show how the ground moves over time. These products make it possible to identify areas with stable conditions, detect areas showing movement, and follow how deformation develops. For users, this means access to consistent, nationwide information that can support screening, follow-up, and interpretation. The products are particularly useful for identifying areas that may require closer investigation, supporting risk assessments, and improving the basis for land-use planning and infrastructure management. Because the information is updated regularly and covers large areas, it offers a practical way to detect patterns and changes that may not be visible through field observations alone. In this way, the service helps turn Earth observation data into practical and actionable information for day-to-day decision support.

The core observations and data source is SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) data from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission. Sentinel-1 provides systematic radar observations with consistent revisit cycles, enabling monitoring over large areas. These observations are used in InSAR processing to detect subtle surface deformation with millimetre-scale sensitivity. This makes it possible to identify and follow ground movement affecting unstable rock slopes, landslides, subsidence, and infrastructure.

Although InSAR cannot directly replace on-site investigations and local monitoring methods, InSAR Norway has given users a new overview of ground movement across the country. For the first time, authorities have gained a comprehensive overview of where the ground is actually moving, where it is stable, and where changes are emerging over time. This shift from fragmented, local observations to continuous, nationwide insight has fundamentally improved monitoring of potentially dangerous areas.

The service helps protect buildings, roads, railways, dams, and reservoirs, as well as other critical infrastructure, and also supports the monitoring of climate-driven slope instability.