Development of InSAR Neutral Atmospheric Delay Correction Model by Use of GNSS ZTD and Its Horizontal Gradient

Abstract

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) often suffers from atmospheric disturbances due to the microwave propagation delay effect, which limits the surface displacement detection accuracy to an order of centimeters or more. Here I developed a new neutral atmospheric delay correction model for InSAR by using the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) zenith total delay (ZTD) and its horizontal gradient data. The proposed model at first retrieves the regularly gridded ZTD distribution at sea level and the linear height dependence from GNSS ZTD and gradient observations by the least squares method. Then, the gridded ZTD is projected onto the InSAR coordinate to correct the neutral atmospheric delay. I evaluated the correction model performance by applying it to L-band ALOS-2/PALSAR-2 ScanSAR interferograms over the Kanto plain in Japan. The correction result showed that by applying the proposed delay correction the phase standard deviation decreased by 33.87 % on average. By comparing it with the generic atmospheric correction online service for InSAR (GACOS) model and the correction by the Japanese regional mesoscale weather model (MSM), the proposed GNSS-based model outperformed others in my test case. The sensitivity test indicated that including the delay gradient could improve delay reproducibility under situations with fewer available GNSS stations. Although the proposed correction model’s applicability depends on the number of available GNSS stations at the area of interest, the proposed model has a potential to effectively mitigate the neutral atmospheric delay and to improve the detection ability for smallamplitude surface displacements.