Identifying Potential Landslides by Stacking-InSAR in Southwestern China and Its Performance Comparison with SBAS-InSAR

Lele Zhang,Rubing Liang,Keren Dai,Qiang Xu,Weile Li,Daqing Ge,Jin Deng

doi:10.3390/rs13183662

Lele Zhang, Rubing Liang + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13183662

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Abstract

Landslide disasters occur frequently in the mountainous areas in southwest China, which pose serious threats to the local residents. Interferometry Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) provides us the ability to identify active slopes as potential landslides in vast mountainous areas, to help prevent and mitigate the disasters. Quickly and accurately identifying potential landslides based on massive SAR data is of great significance. Taking the national highway near Wenchuan County, China, as study area, this paper used a Stacking-InSAR method to quickly and qualitatively identify potential landslides based on a total of 40 Sentinel SAR images acquired from November 2017 to March 2019. As a result, 72 active slopes were successfully detected as potential landslides. By comparing the results from Stacking-InSAR with the results from the traditional SBAS-InSAR (Small Baselines Subset) time series method, it was found that the two methods had a high consistency, with 81.7% potential landslides identified by both of the two methods. A detailed comparison on the detection differences was performed, revealing that Stacking-InSAR, compared to SBAS-InSAR may miss a few active slopes with small spatial scales, small displacement levels and the ones affected by the atmosphere, while it has good performance on poor-coherence regions, with the advantages of low technical requirements and low computation labor. The Stacking-InSAR method would be a fast and powerful method to qualitatively and effectively identify potential landslides in vast mountainous areas, with a comprehensive understanding of its specialty and limitations.

Highlights

Landslide disasters occur frequently in the mountainous southwestern region of China, and often cause severe economic losses and even huge casualties [1,2,3,4,5]
The Stacking-Interferometry Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) results are shown in Figure 3a, with a total of 72 potential landslides clearly identified
This paper used the StackingInSAR method to quickly and accurately identify active slopes based on 40 Sentinel-1

Summary

Introduction

Landslide disasters occur frequently in the mountainous southwestern region of China, and often cause severe economic losses and even huge casualties [1,2,3,4,5]. Identifying where landslides could happen is important for landslides hazard mitigation. Interferometry Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), with the advantages of all-day, all-weather, cloud-free and high measurement accuracy [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14], has become a useful tool to identify active slopes, which are probably potential landslides. In the vast steep mountainous region of southwestern China, the fast and accurate identification of potential landslides with the use of cutting-edge InSAR technology is of great significance for subsequent monitoring and early warning to mitigate landslide disasters.

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