EGMS-PCA: a Python GUI tool for temporal analysis of EGMS time series

The European Ground Motion Service (EGMS) constitutes a part of the European Union’s Copernicus program, providing a continental-scale and open-access dataset of ground surface displacement. The EGMS data are derived from multi-temporal Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (MT-InSAR) processing of the Sentinel-1 SAR satellite imagery, collected from 2015, across the European territory. The paper introduces the EGMS-PCA tool, a Python-based graphical user interface (GUI) application that employs the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to facilitate the temporal analysis of EGMS time series. The tool provides an efficient workflow that enables users to analyse MT-InSAR displacement components (i.e. ascending, descending, east-west, vertical) and distinguish between different displacement patterns. The EGMS-PCA tool has the capacity to automatically manage the EGMS data, merge and interpolate the time series, clip on a Region of Interest (ROI) provided by the user, apply the PCA analysis, generate a plot of each cluster and provide the output in a Geographic Information System (GIS)-ready format for further analysis. The practical utility of the tool is demonstrated through a country-scale benchmark application in Northern Ireland, where the complete workflow ingests almost one million measurement points and analyses over 380,000 of them within the region of interest in approximately 24 min. The resulting classification identifies a set of subsiding clusters whose spatial distribution shows a quantified agreement with independently mapped peatland areas, illustrating the scalability of the software and its suitability for the preliminary exploration of large-scale ground deformation datasets.