Monitoring of the ground displacement in the Isfahan, Iran, metropolitan area using persistent scatterer interferometric synthetic aperture radar technique

Abstract

Recent reports from Isfahan, Iran, have announced the possibility of potential land subsidence due to the persistence of drought, interbasin water transfer, and groundwater overexploitation. By this token, we seek to employ the persistent scatterer interferometric synthetic aperture radar technique to detect and measure the land subsidence phenomenon in the Isfahan metropolitan area. The Sentinel interferometric synthetic aperture radar dataset was used for detecting land subsidence phenomena. The corresponding data pairs were acquired and analyzed for the period from 2014 to 2019. Our prime objective is to map the spatial and temporal variations in surface deformation in Isfahan using the multitemporal persistent scatterer interferometric synthetic aperture radar (MT-PSI) technique. Results indicate that Isfahan had been undergoing subsidence throughout the observation period of 2014 to 2019 at an estimated rate of −5 to −100  mm  /  year. Subsidence has increased from south to north of metropolitan areas from 2014 to 2019. The MT-PSI time series during the observation period correspond well with fluctuations in the level of the groundwater. The subsidence in the Isfahan region is mainly due to human activities. The estimated subsidence rates in the city for the period from 2014 to 2019 showed no signs of high subsidence rate in the cultural-historic and economic sites of the urban regions of Isfahan.