Measuring lateral ground movement with synthetic aperture radar differential interferometry: technique and validation

Research under the framework of natural hazards monitoring with Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) has gained eminence in the last 10 years with advances in satellite imaging systems. Ground movement is known to be a form of natural hazard, which threatens the integrity of buried infrastructure as either massive instantaneous movement or visually imperceptible, slow incremental movement over a long period. Both types of movement can lead to serious damage. InSAR techniques have been well investigated for measuring ground subsidence, the vertical component of ground movement. If it is incorrectly assumed that the lateral movement component is zero, subsidence movement derived from one satellite look direction will contain errors. The research presented here has resulted in the derivation of a technique by which both vertical and lateral ground movement components can be estimated. Adopting the suggested technique for routine InSAR analysis in certain instances will provide the ability to derive more accurate subsidence estimates compared to the standard single look technique