ALBERT

Description: The dominant error source of Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (InSAR) is atmospheric phase screen (APS), resulting in phase delay of the radar signal propagating through the atmosphere. The APS in the atmosphere can be decomposed into stratified and turbulent components. In this paper, we introduced a method to compensate for stratified component in a radar interferogram using ERA-Interim reanalysis products obtained from European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). Our comparative results with radiosonde data demonstrated that atmospheric condition from ERA-Interim could produce reasonable patterns of vertical profiles of atmospheric states. The stratified atmosphere shows seasonal changes which are correlated with time. It cannot be properly estimated by temporal high-pass filtering which assumes that atmospheric effects are random in time in conventional persistent scatterer InSAR (PSI). Thus, the estimated deformation velocity fields are biased. Therefore, we propose the atmosphere-corrected PSI method that the stratified delay are corrected on each interferogram by using ERA-Interim. The atmospheric residuals after correction of stratified delay were interpreted as random variations in space and time which are mitigated by using spatial–temporal filtering. We applied the proposed method to ENVISAT ASAR images covering Taiyuan basin, China, to study the ground deformation associated with groundwater withdrawal. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly mitigate the topography-correlated APS and the estimated ground displacements agree more closely with GPS measurements than the conventional PSI.

Description: Excessive groundwater exploitation is common through the Taiyuan basin, China, and is well known to result in ground subsidence. However, most ground subsidence studies in this region focus on a single place (Taiyuan city), and thus fail to demonstrate the regional extent of the deformation phenomena in the whole basin. In this study, we used Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) time series analysis to investigate land subsidence across the entire Taiyuan basin region. Our data set includes a total of 75 ENVISAT ASAR images from two different frames acquired from August 2003 to September 2010 and 33 TerraSAR-X scenes spanning between March 2009 and March 2010. ERA-Interim reanalysis was used to correct the stratified delay to reduce the bias expected from the systematic components of tropospheric delay. The residual delay after correction of stratified delay can be considered as a stochastic component and be mitigated through spatial-temporal filtering. A comparison with MERIS (Medium-Resolution Imaging Spectrometer) measurements indicates that our atmospheric corrections improved agreement over the conventional spatial-temporal filtering by about 20%. The displacement results from our atmosphere-corrected time series InSAR were further validated with continuous GPS data. We found eight subsiding centers in the basin and a surface uplift to the north of Taiyuan city. The causes of ground deformation are analyzed and discussed in relation to gravity data, pre-existing faults, and types of land use.