Daniel Monells

Application of TerraSAR-X data to the monitoring of urban subsidence in the city of Murcia

This paper presents an analysis of the performance of TerraSAR-X for subsidence monitoring in urban areas. The city of Murcia has been selected as a test-site due to its high deformation rate and the set of extensometers deployed along the city that provide validation data. The obtained results have been compared with those ob-tained from ERS/ENVISAT data belonging to the same period and validated with the in-situ measurements.

Landslide monitoring with spotlight TerraSAR-X DATA

This paper aims to demonstrate that radar-based remote sensing techniques can be as effective as the conventional geotechnical ones for the detection and monitoring of well suited areas. Many of the high mountain landslides are vegetated areas that decorrelate faster at X-band. As in these scenarios the number of coherent scatterers is low and, in addition, the area of interest is usually small, the processing can be benefited of the usage of high-resolution data. This will maximize the chances of detecting persistent scatters coming from both natural targets and man-made structures. The high resolution Spotlight mode of TerraSAR-X is thus the perfect choice as it offers a fine resolution. On the other hand, its 11 days of revisit time and X-band carrier allows the monitoring of small variations in the landslide trend and deal with its variable dynamics.

Application of the Coherent Pixels Technique (CPT) to urban monitoring

During the past years, Remote Sensing has become a powerful tool for earth observation. In particular, SAR differential interferometry (DInSAR) has shown to be a very reliable technique for deformation phenomena monitoring, being able to achieve millimetric accuracies. It is the aim of this paper to present and show the potentials of the UPCs advanced DInSAR algorithm, the coherent pixels technique (CPT). Deformation results of different studied areas will be presented, revealing the performances of DInSAR for risk management as well as for the understanding of much geological processes.

Phase quality optimization in Orbital Differential SAR Interferometry with fully polarimetric data

Orbital Differential SAR Interferometry (DInSAR) is a well-known technique to retrieve terrain deformation phenomena from wide areas with high resolution. Historically its application has been limited to single polarization SAR, mainly due to the unavailability of polarimetric data. Lately, the launch of several satellites with polarimetric capabilities, such as Radarsat-2 or TerraSAR-X, allows merging polarimetric and interferometric techniques in order to improve the results obtained in the DInSAR processing. This work will explore the existent analytical techniques in order to optimize the quality of the subsidence results. The dataset used contains 35 Fine Quad-Pol Radarsat-2 acquisitions over the city of Barcelona (Spain).

Optimizing interferogram generation, pixel selection and data processing for high non-linear deformation monitoring with Orbital DInSAR

A necessary step for every DInSAR technique is to properly select the data from which deformation information will be calculated. Two main processes must be done in this sense, the interferogram set creation and the quality pixel selection. In this paper we will present advances concerning both issues: a new method for selecting a high quality and reduced interferogram set solving an equivalent minimum spanning tree system and a pixel selection criterion based in region growing type algorithms. Furthermore, in order to avoid errors when dealing with highly non-linear deformation patterns, a temporal block differential processing is proposed.