Advances in the generation of deformation time series from SAR data sequences in areas affected by large dynamics

Abstract

We propose advances on the generation of deformation time series in areas affected by large deformation dynamics, where the exploitation of the differential SAR phase can be strongly limited by severe misregistration errors or by very high fringe rates. First, to overcome the former issue, we present an extension of the amplitude-based Pixel-Offset (PO) analyses by applying the Small BAseline Subset (SBAS) strategy, in order to move from the investigation of single (large) deformation events to that of dynamic phenomena. Secondly, to handle the high fringe rate interferograms, we subtract from them properly generated synthetic deformation models allowing us to reduce the fringe rate, thus helping the phase unwrapping step. The proposed approaches have been tested on ASAR-ENVISAT data acquired on Galapagos Islands and validated via continuous GPS measurements.