Spatio-temporal analysis of deformation at San Emidio geothermal field, Nevada, USA between 1992 and 2010

Abstract

Although subsidence has been observed at the San Emidio geothermal field in Nevada using interferometric synthetic aperture radar since the early 1990s, the spatial extent and temporal evolution of the subsidence have not heretofore been quantified. Furthermore, the weather conditions and geographic location of San Emidio negatively affect interferometric image quality, causing low correlation amongst pairs. To address this, we introduce a new method for selecting pairs in areas of low correlation and small deformation signal using a minimum spanning tree method with a measure of image quality as the weighting criterion. We validate our pair selection approach by comparing our data products to SqueeSARTM data products from a previous study at San Emidio. We also develop a deformation model which characterizes the spatial extent of subsidence at San Emidio in terms of volume change of the reservoir. After applying this deformation model to our data set of interferometric pairs, we examine the temporal relationship of the observed deformation with production and injection operations associated with geothermal power production.