A Multi-Temporal Small Baseline Interferometry Procedure Applied to Mining-Induced Deformation Monitoring

This work addresses a methodology based on the interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) applied to analyze and monitor ground-motion phenomena induced by underground mining activities in the Legnica-Glogow copper district, south-western Poland. The adopted technique employs an InSAR processing chain that exploits a stack of Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images using a small baseline multitemporal approach. Interferograms with small temporal baselines are first selected, then their network is optimized and reduced to eliminate noisy data, in order to mitigate the effect of decorrelation sources related to seasonal phenomena, i.e., snow and vegetation growth, and to the radar acquisition geometry. The atmospheric disturbance is mitigated using a spatio-temporal filter based on the nonequispaced fast Fourier transform. The estimated displacement maps and time series show the effect of both linear and impulsive ground motion and are validated against global navigation satellite system (GNSS) measurements. In this context, a significant threat to the built environment is represented by seismic tremors triggered by underground mining activities, which are analyzed using the proposed method to integrate the information gathered by in situ seismometer devices. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.This work is part of the Spanish Grant SARAI, PID2020-116540RB-C21, funded by MCIN/ AEI/10.13039/501100011033. This research was partially conducted under the project titled Automatic System for Monitoring the Influence of High-Energy Paraseismic Tremors on the Surface Using GNSS/PSInSAR Satellite Observations and Seismic Measurements (Project No. POIR.04.01.04-00-0056/17), co-financed from the European Regional Development Fund within the Smart Growth Operational Program 2014–2020