Urban Surface Deformation Management: Assessing Dangerous Subsidence Areas through Regional Surface Deformation, Natural Factors, and Human Activities

Abstract

Geological disasters caused by surface deformation are common, especially in urban areas, which seriously impede urbanization’s sustainable development. Monitoring and analysis with high spatial and temporal resolution are particularly important to assess the risk of geological disasters caused by urban deformation. This study uses Sentinel-1A satellite imagery to obtain the surface deformation time series of Nanchang City based on SBAS-InSAR and PS-InSAR techniques and is combined with wavelet period analysis and gray correlation analysis to determine the correlation between deformation area and climate environment. This study shows that there was a large-scale subsidence trend in the central urban area of Nanchang in those two years, and an uplift trend in the agro-ecological areas in the southeast. A periodic analysis further shows that the areas with larger changes in surface deformation are more affected by changes in precipitation. This study, integrated with external data, examines the possibility of subsidence disasters occurring along subway lines in areas with large deformation magnitudes from multiple angles.