Background
The Satellite Needs Working Group (SNWG) 2018 assessment found that knowing where the land surface is deforming would help satisfy the satellite needs of U.S. land monitoring agencies.
The North America DISP data product suite uses imagery from five radar satellites — Sentinel-1 A/B/C/D and NASA/Indian Space Research Organization Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) — to produce two products that identify where and when the land surface has moved due to processes such as sinkholes, land subsidence, landslides, permafrost motion, volcanic unrest, earthquakes, and more. These products have a resolution of less than 30 m and repeat every 6, 12, or 24 days, depending on the input satellite data source.
Sentinel-1's imagery provides a detailed deformation time series from July 2016, but has limited coverage in regions with significant vegetation and snow. NISAR's vegetation penetrating L-band radar will be able to track land surface displacement in most of the ecosystems across North America.
Further information about NASA's Observational Products for End-Users from Remote Sensing Analysis (OPERA) project and the DISP product suite can be found below.
Status
Currently in development, but some data are available now
The OPERA DISP Sentinel-1 product is available for download from NASA's Alaska Satellite Facility Distributed Active Archive Center (ASF DAAC), with a historical record from 2016 to 2024. OPERA is processing 2025 data before switching to forward production. OPERA and ASF DAAC also collaborated to make the data available through a custom visualization portal. The DISP NISAR (DISP-NI) product is not yet available.
Solution Characteristics
| Products | DISP-S1 | DISP-NI |
|---|---|---|
| Platform | Sentinel-1A/B/C/D | NISAR |
| Processing Level | 3 | 3 |
| Temporal Coverage | Based on Sentinel-1 A/B/C/D availability (April 2014 - current) | Based on NISAR availability |
| Temporal Frequency | 6 to 12 days | 6 to 12 days |
| Spatial Coverage | North America* | North America* |
| Spatial Resolution | Less than or equal to 30 m | Less than or equal to 30 m |
| Data Format | HDF5 | HDF5 |
* North America: the United States (USA) and U.S. Territories, Canada within 200 km of the U.S. border and the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and all mainland countries from the southern U.S. border to Panama
Societal Impact
This solution provides timely maps of ground surface motion caused by diverse factors such as earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, subsidence and/or uplift caused by mining, groundwater loss, or fluid injection. These types of outputs are critical for hazard response and for monitoring of infrastructure stability.
Solution Resources
Need help using this solution? For more information about the DISP product suite, visit the following resources:
- OPERA Overview
- OPERA DISP website
- OPERA DISP Applications Github
- OPERA DISP Product Suite: SNWG Solution Fact Sheet
- OPERA DISP on Earthdata SNWG Portal
- ASF Displacement Portal
- OPERA Stakeholder Engagement Program
Workshops and Open Meetings
| Title and Registration Link | Description | Date |
|---|---|---|
| OPERA Surface Displacement Products for Your Science and Decision-Making Applications | This webinar centers around the DISP algorithm, validation framework, and real-world applications of the OPERA DISP suite to illustrate how these datasets make decision-making easier for end-users. | April 9, 2026 |
| Fifth OPERA Stakeholder Engagement Workshop | The fifth OPERA workshop reports updates on the OPERA data products (including DISP) and how to access and leverage them for common applications. It also introduces OPERA's upcoming Vertical Land Motion (VLM) product suite. | Sept. 11, 2025 |
| Discover and Access the OPERA-DISP Dataset Using ASF DAAC’s Displacement Portal | This webinar focused on the OPERA DISP dataset and the ASF Displacement Portal, which allows for spatial browsing and exploration of the OPERA DISP data. | May 29, 2025 |
| Fourth OPERA Stakeholder Engagement Workshop | The fourth workshop provided updates on OPERA data products in production, preliminary validation of data products that were near-production, and an overview of upcoming products. End users had an opportunity to present their use (or planned use) of OPERA products. | July 19, 2024 |
| The Beginning of a New Era of Multidisciplinary NASA Satellite Data Products Enabled by the Satellite Needs Working Group | The SNWG is a government inter-agency organizational body established in 2016 to identify Earth observational gaps and data needs across the U.S. federal civilian agencies. The SNWG effort is a two-year process in which NASA identifies and ultimately implements a range of innovative solutions that benefit the entire Earth science community. In this session, we invited representatives from NASA’s SNWG Implementation Team (NSITE) to describe new capabilities and where to access the data. The discussion included the Harmonized Landsat/Sentinel-2 (HLS), a cloud optimized dataset that standardizes common data bands from the two satellite constellations, effectively doubling the data available to the community. Another SNWG solution is the generation of a global surface water extent products that combine the data frequency of optical satellites and the cloud-penetrating capabilities of radar for a uniformed and frequent surface water product. Other solutions include new radiation and clouds products, global air quality, land surface disturbance, North America land deformation, vegetation indices suite with HLS, and planetary boundary layer products. | Dec. 13, 2023 |
| Third OPERA workshop: Introducing the OPERA Radiometric Terrain Corrected (RTC) Radar Backscatter and Coregistrated Single Look Complex (CSLC) Products | In this workshop, the OPERA team provided an update on the Dynamic Surface Water Extent and Surface Disturbance products. They also introduced provisional RTC and CSLC products. | June 27, 2023 |
| Second OPERA Workshop: Introducing OPERA Interim Products and Updates on Surface Water Extent and Disturbance Products | In this workshop, the OPERA team presented preliminary validation results for the surface water (DSWx) and surface disturbance (DIST) products, while also providing information on how to access them. | Sept. 2, 2022 |