Where most of the detections made by CoSMiC-EYE are detections of activities undertaken by human, the system also detects natural changes, like landslides. In today’s example of one of the detections made you can clearly see a landslide that caused a wash-out in the pipeline corridor. Such natural changes can pose a threat to the pipeline as well, as it can lead to a reduced depth-of-cover, or even to pipeline exposure.

By combining SAR-data and multi-spectral data, Orbital Eye is able to detect a variety of activities in the pipeline corridor, ensuring that our customers are aware all of potential dangerous activities, whether they are anthropogenic or natural!

This week in TPI Tuesday we show an example of where we detected a big pile of sand on top of the pipeline. Although the chance that the pipeline will be directly damaged by this is only small, the storage of materials on top of a pipeline causes increased stress on the pipeline, which can influence the condition of the pipeline. Therefore our customers want to be aware of these kind of activities as well, so they can take the necessary actions to have the materials removed.

Next to actively monitoring storage activities on top of pipelines, Orbital Eye can also look back in time and report storage activities that have taken place over the past years. Pipeline operators use this data to get more insight into possible causes of leakages that occur – or to determine which parts of a pipeline should be prioritised for maintenance. As you can imagine, the more materials have been stored on top of a pipeline, the more likely it is that the condition of that pipeline has deteriorated.

If you want to know more about how Orbital Eye can do an historical analysis of events that have taken place at a specific location, feel free to send an email to info@orbitaleye.nl!

In this weeks episode we discuss a case of third party interference involving the clearance of trees. This type of activities can be particularly risky for underground utilities and critical infrastructure, especially when also the tree stumps are being removed.

Although, vegetation and deforestation monitoring are some of the more known applications of satellites in the context of third party risk management it is not the vegetation change, but the activity that caused it, that is relevant. This is simply because the activity might involve heavy machinery that has the potential to damage your infrastructure.

Orbital Eye’s CoSMiC-EYE solution monitors critical infrastructure using radar satellites, especially optimized to detect these type of third party activities early on, so there is still time for risk mitigation.

The image below shows before and after satellite imagery for a piece of land from which all trees and vegetation is cleared. The three insets on top detail the kind of info that can be extracted from sentinel-1, sentinel-2 and high-res optical satellite data. While Sentinel-1 provides the all-weather capability to detect the preparation or start of an activity on this location, both Sentinel-2 and High-Res optical data prove very valuable in assessing the type, exact nature and extent of the activity.

Orbital Eye combines all this information coming from different sources in their use-case tailored solutions!