Reduction of natural disaster in Bulgaria by adopting DInSAR as a landslide monitoring approach

Abstract

1. Extended abstractMonitoring the actual behavior of landslides is essential for assessing and predicting the risk of disaster. However, since the target area is usually huge, monitoring has not often been conducted due to technical difficulties and cost problem.Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a high-resolution radar device that is mounted on an artificial satellite. It transmits pulse waves to the Earth’s surface and receives the reflections. Differential Interferometric SAR (DInSAR) is a technique for detecting the displacements of the Earth’s surface using SAR data and it has the potential to be an efficient, effective, and economical method for monitoring the landslide behavior in extensive areas. The great advantage of DInSAR is that it can monitor huge areas without the use of any sensors on the ground surface.The author is now conducting a project of application of DInSAR to monitor the landslide behavior in the northern Black Sea coast in Bulgaria as an international collaboration with Bulgaria, Japan, Indonesia and Croatia by members of ISRM.The distribution maps and the time-transition of the displacements in that area were obtained over a period of six years starting in 2014. DInSAR was able to detect the typical landslide behavior in northern Black Sea coast. The results agreed well with the actual behavior described in the Bulgarian official report of landslides. This study can suggest that DInSAR will be a useful tool for long-term continuous landslide monitoring in the northern Black Sea coast. The SAR application project will continue.