An innovative extraction methodology of active deformation areas based on sentinel-1 SAR dataset: the catalonia case study

Abstract

ABSTRACT Persistent scatterer interferometry (PSI) has been proved to be an advanced Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) technique used to measure and monitor terrain deformation. Two of the critical problems with InSAR have been the effect of the refractive atmosphere and decorrelation on the interferometric phases due to long spatial-temporal baseline. The low density of persistent scatterers (PS) in non-urban areas affected by spatial-temporal decoherence more seriously has inspired the development of alternative approaches. Sentinel-1 (S1) has improved the data acquisition throughout, and compared to previous sensors, increased considerably the differential interferometric SAR (DInSAR) and PSI deformation monitoring potential. This paper describes an innovative methodology to process S1 SAR data. Different with PSI, its most original part includes two key processing stages: high and low frequency splitting from wrapped phases, prior to atmospheric filtering, and final direct integration to generate the complete deformation with time series containing linear and nonlinear components. The proposed method has two fundamental advantages compared with traditional PSI approach: the final monitoring results with excellent coverage of coherent points and the generation of active maps even for the areas with serious deformation in short term to break through the inherent limitation of PSI. The effectiveness of the proposed tools is illustrated using a case study located in Catalonia (Spain). This methodology has supposed a definitive step towards the implementation of DInSAR based techniques to support decision makers against geohazards. In this work, the deformation procedures happened in three different areas of the Catalonia (Spain) are presented and analysed. The maximum accumulated subsidence of over – 60 cm induced by mining activity can be detected by proposed methodology with nice coverage from January 2017 to January 2019. These reported cases illustrate how DInSAR based techniques can provide detailed terrain deformation for geohazard activity with complex topographical conditions. The active deformation areas map can be generated in fast aimed at geohazard risk early warning and management.