Monitoring Highway Stability in Permafrost Regions with X-band Temporary Scatterers Stacking InSAR

Sensors

Zhenhong Li¹  Keren Dai²  Guoxiang Liu³  Xiaowen Wang³  Guangyu Li³  Deying Ma³  Bo Zhang³  Jia Tang⁴ 

[1] COMET, School of Engineering, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK;College of Earth Sciences, Chengdu University of Technology, Chengdu 610059, China;Department of Surveying and Geo-Informatics, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 610031, China;Sichuan No. 1 Surveying and Mapping Engineering Institute, Chengdu 610100, China;

关键词: InSAR;    temporary scatterers;    permafrost region;    highway subsidence;    thermokarst;    season frozen soil;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s18061876

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Interferograms with short wavelength (e.g., X-band) are usually prone to temporal decorrelation in permafrost regions, leading to the unavailability of sufficient high-coherence interferograms for performing conventional time series InSAR analysis. This paper proposes the utilization of temporary scatterers for the stacking InSAR method, thus enabling extraction of subsidence in a permafrost region with limited SAR images and limited high-coherence interferograms. Such method is termed as the temporary scatterers stacking InSAR (TSS-InSAR). Taking the Gonghe-Yushu highway (about 30 km), part of G214 National Highway in Qinghai province (in a permafrost region), as a case study, this TSS-InSAR approach was demonstrated in detail and implemented. With 10 TerraSAR-X images acquired during the period from May 2015 to August 2015, the subsidence along this highway was extracted. In this case the lack of a consistent number of SAR acquisitions limits the possibility to perform other conventional time series InSAR analysis. The results show that the middle part of this highway is in the thermokarst and seasonal frozen soil area, and its accumulated subsidence reach up to 10 cm in 110 days. The thawing phenomena is still the main reason for the instability of highway. The results demonstrate that the TSS-InSAR method can effectively extract the subsidence information in a challenging scenario with limited X-band SAR images and limited high-coherence interferograms, where other time series InSAR-based techniques cannot be applied in a simple way.

【 授权许可】

Unknown