[1] Interferometric synthetic aperture radar data are used to map the interseismic velocity field along the Haiyuan fault system (HFS), at the north-eastern boundary of the Tibetan plateau. Two M $ 8 earthquakes ruptured the HFS in 1920 and 1927, but its 260 km-long central section, known as the Tianzhu seismic gap, remains unbroken since $1000 years. The Envisat SAR data, spanning the 2003-2009 period, cover about 200 Â 300 km 2 along three descending and two ascending tracks. Interferograms are processed using an adapted version of ROI_PAC. The signal due to stratified atmospheric phase delay is empirically corrected together with orbital residuals. Mean line-of-sight velocity maps are computed using a constrained time series analysis after selection of interferograms with low atmospheric noise. These maps show a dominant left-lateral motion across the HFS, and reveal a narrow, 35 km-long zone of high velocity gradient across the fault in between the Tianzhu gap and the 1920 rupture. We model the observed velocity field using a discretized fault creeping at shallow depth and a least squares inversion. The inferred shallow slip rate distribution reveals aseismic slip in between two fully locked segments. The average creep rate is $5 mm yr À1 , comparable in magnitude with the estimated loading rate at depth, suggesting no strain accumulation on this segment. The modeled creep rate locally exceeds the long term rate, reaching 8 mm yr À1, suggesting transient creep episodes. The present study emphasizes the need for continuous monitoring of the surface velocity in the vicinity of major seismic gaps in terms of seismic hazard assessment.

The Siling Co Lake is the largest endorheic lake in Central Tibet. Altimetric measures, combined with lake contours, show that in 1972-1999 its water level remained stable, while it increased by about 1.0 m/yr in the period [2000][2001][2002][2003][2004][2005][2006]. The increased rate gradually stepped down to 0.2 m/yr in 2007-2011. The ground motion associated with the water load increase is studied by interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) using 107 ERS and Envisat SAR images during the period 1992-2011. The deformation amplitude closely follows the lake level temporal evolution, except that subsidence continues in 2008-2011, while the lake level stagnated. This temporal evolution suggests a non elastic relaxation process taking place at a decade timescale. Phase delay maps are used to constrain possible layered viscoelastic rheological models. An elastic model could partly explain the observed subsidence rate if elastic moduli are about twice lower than those extracted from V P /V S profiles. The surface deformation pattern is also extracted by projecting the phase delay maps against the best fit model temporal behavior. It shows that deep relaxation in the asthenosphere is negligible at the decade timescale and favors the existence of a ductile channel in the deep crust above a more rigid mantle. Overall, the best fit model includes a ductile lower crust, with a viscosity of 1-3 × 10 18 Pa s between 25 and 35 km and the Moho (at 65 km), overlying a rigid mantle.

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Abstract-In this paper, we introduce an iterative speckle filtering method for polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) images based on the bilateral filter. To locally adapt to the spatial structure of images, this filter relies on pixel similarities in both spatial and radiometric domains. To deal with polarimetric data, we study the use of similarities based on a statistical distance called Kullback-Leibler divergence as well as two geodesic distances on Riemannian manifolds. To cope with speckle, we propose to progressively refine the result thanks to an iterative scheme. Experiments are run over synthetic and experimental data. First, simulations are generated to study the effects of filtering parameters in terms of polarimetric reconstruction error, edge preservation and smoothing of homogeneous areas. Comparison with other methods shows that our approach compares well to other state of the art methods in the extraction of polarimetric information and shows superior performance for edge restoration and noise smoothing. The filter is then applied to experimental data sets from ESAR and FSAR sensors (DLR) at L-band and S-band, respectively. These last experiments show the ability of the filter to restore structures such as buildings and roads and to preserve boundaries between regions while achieving a high amount of smoothing in homogeneous areas.

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