The Slumgullion landslide in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado is a translational debris slide whose active part has been moving for at least 300 years. To further study the kinematic characteristics of the spatiotemporal domain of landslides, we establish a kinematic model based on the behavior of the Slumgullion landslide. The kinematic parameters are inverted with 45 sets of surface displacement fields measured by the time series offset tracking method using uninhabited aerial vehicle synthetic aperture radar (UAVSAR) data obtained for the period from August 2011 to November 2013. The inversion results indicate that the Slumgullion landslide moves with an average velocity of up to 1.2 cm/day and presents obvious seasonal changes in velocity. According to the change of sliding velocity, the head and tail of the Slumgullion landslide tend to be stable, whereas the neck of the landslide is accelerating. The topography has an important influence on the kinematic parameters. Based on the kinematic parameters, we identify the main geological structures of the Slumgullion landslide, including tension cracks, strike‐slip faults, and thrust faults. The geological structures inferred by the kinematic parameters are consistent with a geological interpretive map. We derive more detailed kinematic characteristics for these structures using the obtained the kinematic parameters and infer two previously unmapped thrust faults. Additionally, we also analyze the relationship between the meteorology and the seasonal velocity of the Slumgullion landslide. The consistency between the periodic changes in meteorology (mainly including precipitation and snowmelt) and the seasonal velocity further verifies the rationality of using the kinematic model.
Abstract:With the development of high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems, researchers are increasingly paying attention to the application of SAR offset tracking methods in ground deformation estimation. The traditional normalized cross correlation (NCC) tracking method is based on regular matching windows. For areas with different moving characteristics, especially the landslide boundary areas, the NCC method will produce incorrect results. This is because in landslide boundary areas, the pixels of the regular matching window include two or more types of moving characteristics: some pixels with large displacement, and others with small or no displacement. These two kinds of pixels are uncorrelated, which result in inaccurate estimations. This paper proposes a new offset tracking method with SAR images based on the adaptive matching window to improve the accuracy of landslide displacement estimation. The proposed method generates an adaptive matching window that only contains pixels with similar moving characteristics. Three SAR images acquired by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) system are selected to estimate the surface deformation of the Slumgullion landslide located in the southwestern Colorado, USA. The results show that the proposed method has higher accuracy than the traditional NCC method, especially in landslide boundary areas. Furthermore, it can obtain more detailed displacement information in landslide boundary areas.
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