Feasibility of Along-Track Displacement Measurement From Sentinel-1 Interferometric Wide-Swath Mode

Abstract

The European Space Agency's Sentinel-1, a C-band imaging radar mission to be launched in mid-2013, will provide a continuity of radar data for monitoring the changing Earth. The azimuth resolution of Sentinel-1's background mode, interferometric wide-swath (IW) mode, is four times lower than that of European remote-sensing satellite (ERS) and Envisat systems. Therefore, the measurement accuracy of along-track displacement from Sentinel-1 IW images presumably will be significantly reduced. In this paper, we test the feasibility of along-track displacement measurement from Sentinel-1 IW mode. We simulate Sentinel-1 IW synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images from the ERS raw data that captured the coseismic deformation of the 1999 Hector Mine earthquake in California. Along-track displacement maps are generated using multiple-aperture interferometric SAR (MAI) and intensity tracking techniques, respectively, and are compared with GPS measurements. The root-mean-square (rms) error between the synthetic Sentinel-1 MAI and GPS measurements is about 9.6 cm, which corresponds to only 0.5 % of the azimuth resolution. The rms error between the along-track displacements from synthetic Sentinel-1 offset tracking and GPS is about 27.5 cm, which is about 1.4 % of the azimuth resolution. These results suggest that the MAI method will still be useful to measure along-track displacements from Sentinel-1 IW InSAR imagery and that it would be difficult to effectively measure the along-track displacements by the Sentinel-1 offset tracking method.