Abstract
Underground mining in coal mining areas will induce large-scale, large-gradient surface deformation, threatening the safety of people’s lives and property in nearby areas. Due to mining-related subsidence is characterized by fast displacement and high nonlinearity, monitoring this process by using traditional and single interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) technology is very challenging, and it cannot accurately and quantitatively calculate the deformation of the mining area. In this paper, we proposed a new method that combines both multitemporal consecutive D-InSAR and offset tracking technology to construct a complete deformation field of the coal mining area. Taking into account the accuracy of multitemporal consecutive D-InSAR in calculating small deformation areas and the ability of offset tracking to measure large deformation areas, we utilized their respective advantages to extract the surface influence range and applied an adaptive spatial filtering method to integrate their respective results for inversion of the deformation field. 12 ascending high-resolution TerraSAR-X images (2 m) from September 3, 2018, to October 26, 2019, and 39 descending Sentinel-1 TOPS SAR images from August 5, 2018, to November 4, 2019, in the Ordos Coalfield located at Inner Mongolia, China, were utilized to obtain the whole subsidence field of the working faces F6211 and F6207 during the 454-day mining period. The GPS monitoring station located in the direction of the mining surface is used to verify the accuracy of the above method; at the same time, to a certain extent, the difference between the unmanned aerial vehicle’s DSM data acquired after coal mining and the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (STRM) DEM can qualitatively verify the accuracy of the results. Our results show that the results of TerraSAR are basically consistent with the deformation trend of GPS data, and that of Sentinel-1 have large errors compared with GPS. The maximum central subsidence reaches ~12 m in the working face F6211 and ~4 m in the working face F6207. In the working face F6207, the good agreement between GPS and TerraSAR results indicated that the method above using high-resolution SAR data could be reliable for monitoring the large deformation area in the mining field.
Highlights
The mining and utilization of coal resources are an important support for regional economic development, but the problems of ecological environment and geological disasters follow
D-interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) method was used to compensate for the measurement of large deformation areas and the deformation values during the uncovered time period of TSX images (Figure 6)
The multiple aperture SAR interferometry (MAI), with the deformation resolution between the above two methods, can obtain deformation values with higher accuracy on the order of several centimeters to decimeters, which can get an estimate of the surface displacement along the azimuth (sensor line-of-sight (LOS)) direction [31] and has been used to measure the along-track components of the Earth’s surface deformation [32,33,34,35,36]; the introduction of the MAI method may improve the accuracy of deformation field calculation
Summary
The mining and utilization of coal resources are an important support for regional economic development, but the problems of ecological environment and geological disasters follow. Geological disasters such as ground subsidence induced by underground coal mining have become a huge threat to regional water resources, transportation infrastructure, and people’s lives and property. Coal mining in northwestern China is an important industry, and the Ordos Basin. Ordos, located in Inner Mongolia, China, is one of the important locations for super coal mines. Along with a large number of coal mining regions in Ordos, ground fissures, ground collapse, and land subsidence have undermined the land surface ecosystems [1,2,3]. Obtaining the spatial distribution range and deformation amount of the surface subsidence in this area is helpful to study potential environmental catastrophe and is beneficial to the ecological protection and sustainable development of the mining area
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