Abstract
After the bursting of the Zhuonai Lake in Hoh Xil, Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, in 2011, the water area and level of the Salt Lake increased rapidly. The lake area expanding would accelerate the melting of permafrost and contribute to many severe environmental issues, including the surface deformation around the lake. In this article, we retrieve the deformation of the permafrost area around the Salt lake using the time-series synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry (InSAR) method with ENVISAT and Sentinel-1A images from October 2006 to December 2018. In order to get more measurement points, the distributed scatterers were utilized. Moreover, a deformation model combining two components, long-term linear deformation related with temperature, was adopted in the InSAR processing. The experimental results show that before the outburst of the Zhuonai Lake, the ground deformation was not obvious with the mean deformation rate of -5 to 5 mm/year from the ENVISAT results. From 2014 to 2018, the ground deformation around the Salt Lake gradually increased with the maximum deformation rate over -25 mm/year. The water area and the water level of Salt Lake were extracted based on the SAR amplitude images and Cryosat-2 radar altimeter data, showing a rapid increasing trend after 2017. The time-series displacement in the south of lake shows a high correlation with the lake level history. This study clearly illustrate that time-series InSAR could provide valuable information for monitoring potential hazards in permafrost region.
Highlights
Q INGHAI-TIBET Plateau (QTP) has the largest extent of permafrost outside the polar regions
The ground deformation rate ranges from −5 to 5 mm/year during 2006–2010 observation period derived from ENVISAT images
We can see that the deformation pattern of the two substacks is similar and most of the time deformation rate ranges from −10 to 10 mm/year
Summary
Q INGHAI-TIBET Plateau (QTP) has the largest extent of permafrost outside the polar regions. Because of the unique atmospheric circulation and fragile high-altitude ecosystem, the QTP is more sensitive to climate change than the other plateaus at similar latitudes [1], [2]. The QTP contains over 1200 lakes with areas larger than 1 km, and most of the lakes are in the high-altitude ice-rich permafrost regions. The balance of water and energy in QTP has been broken as well as the precipitation patterns. The lakes on QTP have undergone continuous growth in both number and area in recent years. The expansion of lakes indicated that the permafrost in QTP was unstable and becoming warm
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More From: IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing
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