Aquistore project: ground deformation retrieved by InSAR during May 2012 – May 2013

Objectives of the Aquistore CO2 storage project are to design, adapt, and test non-seismic monitoring methods that have not been systematically utilized to date for monitoring CO2 storage, and to integrate the data from these various monitoring tools to obtain quantitative estimates of the change in subsurface fluid distributions, pressure changes and associated surface deformation. Since spring of 2012 RADARSAT-2 data from five beams (ascending and descending Spotlight, Wide UltraFine and Fine Quad-Pol) were regularly (with the individual frequency of 24 days) collected and used for calculation of ground deformation time series over the Aquistore CO2 storage site located in SE Saskatchewan. The initial InSAR analysis revealed slow ground deformation not related to CO2 injection but caused by various natural and anthropogenic processes - snow melt, surface moisture variation, ground and surface water level changes and post-mining activities. In this work we provide updated results based on over one hundred RADARSAT-2 images acquired during May 2012 - May 2013.