Abstract
Abstract. Satellite-based InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) provides an effective way to measure large-scale land surface motions. Currently, the atmospheric phase delay is one of the most critical issues in InSAR deformation monitoring. Generic Atmospheric Correction Online Service (GACOS) is a free, globally available and easy-to-implement tool to generate high-resolution zenith total delay maps, which could be used for InSAR atmospheric delay correction. The mean velocity could then be estimated by stacking multiple GACOS-corrected interferograms. We applied the proposed GACOS-corrected InSAR stacking method in the North China Plain and analysed its performance. Within the 549 interferograms, more than 85 % gained positive correction performances. The correlation between the phase-dZTD indicator and the performance reached 0.89, demonstrating a significant relationship. Deformation maps revealed by InSAR stacking with and without GACOS corrections showed that GACOS could mainly remove the topography-related and long wavelength signals.
Highlights
The successful operation of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Sentinel-1 satellites provide unprecedented possibilities and convenience for large-scale land surface deformation measurements
549 interferograms are formulated with the restriction that temporal baselines are less than 300 days and at most nine interferometric pairs are generated for each date
The positive values of the performance indicate improvements, and Generic Atmospheric Correction Online Service (GACOS) corrections played a positive role for more than 85 % interferograms in this case
Summary
The successful operation of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Sentinel-1 satellites provide unprecedented possibilities and convenience for large-scale land surface deformation measurements. The implementations of researches or projects covering a whole country, such as Italy (Costantini et al, 2017), Germany (Haghighi and Motagh, 2017), Norway (https://insar.ngu.no, last access: 2 March 2020) and Japan (Ferretti et al, 2019), indicate that dynamic monitoring of land surface deformation with a certain level of automation will be expected to become a routine operation. InSAR has been proven successful in many existing cases, there are still inherent limitations in the technique. At this stage, the atmospheric phase delay, mainly affected by the differences in propagation paths through the troposphere, is one of the most critical issues in large-scale InSAR deformation monitoring.
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