Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar
harder to navigate radar assessments. However, it is still used as a general layout for deformation directions. There remains to be a disparity between urban and rural usage of InSAR in the UK. Furthermore, the UK does not use InSAR technology on a national scale, unlike many European counterparts such as Germany, Norway, the Netherlands and Italy. One example of these is the Dutch Ground Motion Service, which maps 40 billion measurement points across the entire Netherlands, and is publicly available. 3 In contrast, the UK’s use of InSAR is specialized and privately used by companies as a service. This is problematic, as it reduces the nationwide accessibility to InSAR technology, which limits the possibility of repair projects. 4 This was seen in Nottingham when on July 23rd 2025, a sinkhole formed on Upper Parliament Street, where deterioration of Victorian-era infrastructure underneath the road due to water ingress. This caused a culvert failure and rupture, displacing soil and creating a cavity. Part of the road sank. This was a significant urban disruption, as prior surveys have estimated that roughly 250 buses an hour pass through this street. 5 Upper Parliament Street Car Park, which has 200 parking spaces, was disrupted as well. Both local businesses and the Nottingham City Council were significantly impacted as a result, with repairs lasting 6 weeks, and the street re-opening on August 21 st 2025 (9). 6 Severn Trent – the company tasked with the repairs – stated that only visual surveys were made of the site, meaning that further deformation underneath the sinkhole was not noticed until early August, delaying the repair process and resulting in economic damage. This is something that would have been successfully predicted by InSAR technology, nearly halving the repair duration and protecting local businesses. Successful application of InSAR in the UK The use of InSAR in the United Kingdom has shown to be successful in infrastructure monitoring. The successful elements of these projects can be used to help understand the place of InSAR monitoring in a widespread urban setting in order to manage subsidence in tandem with other monitoring methods. The application of InSAR technology has already been considered, particularly in an article for the British Geotechnical Association in 2023 – following the Geo-resilience conference in 2023 –, in which the author assessed the success of this application in England’s strategic road network. 7 The significance of this particular report lay in its mentioning of the strategic significance of the monitored roads, which, though only 2% of England’s roads, carry 2/3 of England’s heavy-goods traffic. This meant that subsidence cases such as in February 2014 (figure 1 on the next page) pose a colossal hazard to transportation logistics in England. 3 See, for example, https://bodemdalingskaart.nl/en-us/ . 4 See Novellino, A. et al. (2017) ‘Assessing the Feasibility of a National InSAR Ground Deformation Map of Great Britain with Sentinel-1’, 30 th March. Available at https://www.mdpi.com/2076- 3263/7/2/19?utm_source=chatgpt.com. 5 ‘Bus services affected by resurfacing works on Upper Parliament Street’, 1 st August 2018. Available at: https://www.mynottinghamnews.co.uk/bus-services-affected-by-resurfacing-works-on-upper-parliament- street/ . 6 News Article on Upper Parliament Street Subsidence (2025), 22 nd August. Available at: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/upper-parliament-street-nottingham-reopens-164501864.html . 7 Pritchard, A. (2023) ‘Application of InSAR for geotechnical asset management on England’s Strategic Road Network’, 28 th March. Available at: https://www.issmge.org/uploads/publications/105/124/Geo- resilience2023_session7.2_Pritchard.pdf .
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