Spatial Analysis of Land Subsidence in the San Luis Potosi Valley Induced by Aquifer Overexploitation Using the Coherent Pixels Technique (CPT) and Sentinel-1 InSAR Observation

María Inés Navarro-Hernández,Roberto Tomás,Abraham Cárdenas-Tristán,Jordi J Mallorquí,Juan M Lopez-Sanchez

doi:10.3390/rs12223822

Abstract

The San Luis Potosi metropolitan area has suffered considerable damage from land subsidence over the past decades, which has become visible since 1990. This paper seeks to evaluate the effects of groundwater withdrawal on land subsidence in the San Luis Potosi Valley and the development of surface faults due to the differential compaction of sediments. For this purpose, we applied the Coherent Pixels Technique (CPT), a Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) technique, using 112 Sentinel-1 acquisitions from October 2014 to November 2019 to estimate the deformation rate. The results revealed that the deformation areas in the municipality of Soledad de Graciano Sánchez mostly exhibit subsidence values between −1.5 and −3.5 cm/year; whereas in San Luis Potosi these values are between −1.8 and −4.2 cm/year. The PSI results were validated by five Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) benchmarks available, providing a data correlation between the results obtained with both techniques of 0.986. This validation suggests that interferometric derived deformations agree well with results obtained from GNSS data. The strong relationship between trace fault, land subsidence,e and groundwater extraction suggests that groundwater withdrawal is resulting in subsidence induced faulting, which follows the pattern of structural faults buried by sediments.

Highlights

Land subsidence is a global phenomenon involving the gradual settling or sudden sinking of ground surface owing to the movement of earth materials [1]
The results revealed that the deformation areas in the municipality of Soledad de Graciano Sánchez mostly exhibit subsidence values between −1.5 and −3.5 cm/year; whereas in San Luis Potosi these values are between −1.8 and −4.2 cm/year
This paper aims to evaluate the effects of groundwater withdrawal in the San Luis Potosi Valley on land subsidence and the development of faults

Summary

Introduction

Land subsidence is a global phenomenon involving the gradual settling or sudden sinking of ground surface owing to the movement of earth materials [1]. This geological hazard can be induced by natural factors like tectonics, consolidation of the soil, and chemical and physical processes. Other anthropogenic factors are related to the extraction of fluids (i.e., gas, oil, and water), mining activity, increase of loads, and compaction [2]. Despite all these causes, groundwater withdrawal is the main trigger of land subsidence [3]. Areas like the San Joaquin Valley [4,5], Mexico city [6,7,8], some Chinese cities [9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17], Murcia [18,19], Tehran [20,21], and Bologna [22], among others, are examples in which the composition of the soil combined with groundwater withdrawal have generated land subsidence

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