Multi-temporal landslide activity investigation by spaceborne SAR interferometry: The case study of the Polish Carpathians

Kamila Pawluszek-Filipiak,Andrzej Borkowski,Mahdi Motagh

doi:10.1016/j.rsase.2021.100629

Abstract

The main goal of this research is to verify the activity state of landslides provided by an existing landslide inventory map using Persistent Scatterers (PS) Interferometry (PSInSAR). The study was conducted in the Małopolskie municipality, a rural setting with sparse urbanization in the Polish Flysch Carpathians. PSInSAR has been applied using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data from ALOS PALSAR and Sentinel 1A/B with different acquisition geometries (ascending and descending orbit) to increase PS coverage and mitigate the geometric effects due to layover and shadowing. The Line-Of-Sight PSInSAR measurements were projected to the steepest slope, which allowed to homogenize the results from diverse acquisition modes and to compare the displacement velocities with different slope orientations. Additionally, landslide intensity (motion rate) and expected damage maps were generated and verified during field investigations. A high correlation between PSInSAR results and in-situ damage observations was confirmed. The activity state and landslide-related expected damage maps have been confirmed for 43 out of a total of 50 landslides investigated in the field. The short temporal baseline provided by both Sentinel satellites (1A/B data) increases the PS density significantly. The study substantiates the usefulness of SAR based landslide activity monitoring for land use and land development, even in rural areas.

Highlights

Landslide Inventory Maps (LIMs) are created using consolidated and innovative techniques (Guzzetti et al, 2012)
A group of Persistent Scatterer Interferometric (PSI) methods exists, which were firstly introduced by Ferretti et al (2001), with their approach usually abbreviated in the literature to Persistent Scatterers (PS) Interferometry (PSInSAR) (Ferretti et al, 2001) and developed further by other scientists (e.g., STAMPS – Hooper et al, 2004; Kampes 2006)
Several landslides in the study area are complex landslides. Such land slides are divided into parts and represented in SOPO databases as separate objects

Summary

Introduction

Landslide Inventory Maps (LIMs) are created using consolidated (field mapping or visual interpretation of stereoscopic aerial photo graphs) and innovative (remote sensing) techniques (Guzzetti et al, 2012). Abun dant interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) applications for landslide studies can be found, e.g., for landslide detection (Meisina et al, 2008; Notti et al, 2010; Bianchini et al, 2012; Motagh et al, 2013; Shi et al, 2020), landslide characterization (Rosi et al, 2018, Zhou et al, 2020; Reyes-Carmona et al, 2020; Shi et al, 2020), landslide monitoring (Notti et al, 2010; Meisina et al, 2008; Haghshenas Haghighi and Motagh, 2016; Herrera et al, 2013; Shi et al, 2020), and landslide activity assessment (Righini et al, 2012; Cigna et al, 2013; Bianchini et al, 2013; Rosi et al, 2018; Reyes-Carmona et al, 2020) This is mainly because SAR missions provide valuable information about ground displacement for a wide area of coverage with a high spatial resolution and great temporal sampling (Bianchini et al, 2013). A wider overview of MTInSAR techniques is provided in Sousa et al (2011) and Crosetto et al (2016)

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